Description
This document about changing the metrics of turnaround to encourage early learning strategies.
CHANGING THE METRICS OF TURNAROUND TO ENCOURAGE EARLY LEARNING STRATEGIES
POLICY CONVERSATIONS
Conversation No. 4 Version 1.0 September 22, 2014
Elliot Regenstein, Ounce of Prevention Fund
Rio Romero-Jurado, Ounce of Prevention Fund
Justin Cohen, Mass Insight Education
Alison Segal
1
, Mass Insight Education
CHANGING THE METRICS OF
TURNAROUND TO ENCOURAGE
EARLY LEARNING STRATEGIES
CHANGING THE METRICS OF TURNAROUND TO ENCOURAGE EARLY LEARNING STRATEGIES 2
POLICY CONVERSATIONS
Conversation No. 4 Version 1.0 September 22, 2014
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Since the release of The Turnaround Challenge in 2007, the federal government and states have invested
considerable time and money trying to improve the nation’s lowest-performing schools. In many of the
lowest-performing elementary schools, one major problem is that children are entering kindergarten
already behind. Yet the metrics used to evaluate turnaround success all but guarantee that turnarounds
will focus resources on later years. Changing the Metrics of Turnaround to Encourage Early Learning Strategies
argues that the federal government and states should rethink their metrics for turnaround success in
order to encourage earlier investment.
The achievement gap starts early—indeed, it can be measured even in the frst year of life. High-quality
early learning can make a signifcant diference in a child’s ability to learn, particularly if it starts before
a child turns 3. Moreover, successful early learning programs can build community and family ties that
beneft children throughout their school careers.
Current turnaround funding supports diferent school-level strategies, but the primary metric of
success—improved test scores—is the same across all available strategies. In elementary schools,
English language arts and math test scores in 3rd grade and up are generally the key determinant of a
turnaround’s success. As long as these metrics are used, however, turnaround leaders will have a major
disincentive to invest in early learning. Even if the period for measuring turnaround success is expanded
from three years to fve, waiting until 3rd grade to measure turnaround success discourages investment
in early learning. If a school launched preschool for 4-year-olds in the frst year of a turnaround, the frst
cohort couldn’t even start impacting the school’s key metrics until year fve of the turnaround. Simply
put, that time lag between investment and payof is too long for most turnaround leaders to bear,
particularly given the sense of urgency for immediate results that turnarounds are designed to bring.
To change this dynamic requires changing the metrics of turnaround success and adopting metrics
that can be used prior to 3rd grade. Shifting the focus of measurement from standardized test scores
to professional practice allows the success of turnaround to be measured starting in kindergarten or
earlier. This in turn allows schools to reap the beneft of early learning investment almost immediately.
Those professional practice metrics should be used in combination with child outcome metrics—but the
range of available child outcome metrics should be expanded beyond standardized test scores, which
leading researchers have said should not be used for program accountability with children younger
than 3rd grade.
The goal of turnaround funding is to put schools on a trajectory to long-term success, but the metrics
used to measure short-term success in turnarounds efectively eliminate the viability of a potentially
important long-term improvement strategy. Accountability metrics that address early learning and
the K–2 years will not only give turnaround schools a much more precise understanding of what is
occurring before 3rd grade, they will encourage schools to address any challenges immediately. While
early learning may not be the right solution in every turnaround elementary school, changing the metrics
of turnaround to make it a viable option would have benefcial short- and long-term impacts in some of
the nation’s lowest-performing schools.
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I. INTRODUCTION
School turnaround is meant to provide a rapid change in trajectory for the lowest-performing schools.
*
Turnaround schools
†
have had low achievement or signifcant achievement gaps, so they are given
additional resources to make dramatic changes—typically focused on improving the quality of instruction
and professional practice. But in many turnaround schools, a major challenge is that children entering
kindergarten are already months or years behind. For these schools, eforts to improve professional
practice will not change the fact that the school is in perpetual catch-up mode. To address that issue,
they need to start much earlier with high-quality early learning.
‡
Early learning can improve children’s
kindergarten readiness and set the stage for longer-term success.
To date, early learning has not been a major strategy for turnaround schools, in large part because of
the metrics of success used to evaluate the turnaround. Currently, the primary metric of success for
turnaround schools is generally the improvement shown in scores on accountability tests administered
in 3rd grade and up. Those test scores are expected to show signifcant improvement within the frst two
to three years of the turnaround. As long as that is the primary metric of success, however, turnaround
leaders will have a major incentive to not focus resources on early learning. The children served by early
learning in the frst year of a turnaround will not take accountability tests until at least the ffth year of the
turnaround, and by then the turnaround’s success or failure will have already been determined. As long
as that remains the case, turnaround leaders will have a strong incentive to focus resources on serving
children who will take accountability tests in the frst two or three years of the turnaround— even if the
long-term best interests of the school would be better served by greater investment in early learning.
What’s needed to change that dynamic is an entirely new way of measuring success in school turnaround.
The new metrics of success should include two kinds of metrics:
• Metrics that address professional practice, including the quality of instruction and leadership
• Child outcome metrics other than scores on accountability tests
Unlike high-stakes accountability tests, these metrics are suitable for use in kindergarten through grade 2.
If these metrics are used, then schools that use turnaround resources to support early learning can
actually see that early learning investment impacts the determination of the turnaround’s success. New
spending on early learning will not always be the greatest need at turnaround schools, and in many
* Mass Insight defnes school turnaround as a “dramatic and comprehensive intervention in a low-performing school that 1) produces
signifcant gains in achievement within two years; and 2) readies the school for the longer process of transformation into a high-per-
formance organization.” Calkins, A.;, Guenther, W.; Belfore, G.; and Lash, D. (2007). The Turnaround Challenge: Why America’s best
opportunity to dramatically improve student achievement lies in our worst-performing schools. Boston, MA: Mass Insight.
† “Turnaround schools” are schools that have been identifed by the state for a “school turnaround” process based on low perfor-
mance or signifcant achievement gaps. This includes, but is not limited to, schools that are identifed for school turnaround based
on federal requirements as discussed below. In this paper the term “turnaround schools” refers exclusively to elementary or kinder-
garten to 2nd grade (K–2) schools.
‡ The term “early learning” means school-based or center-based programs for children from birth through kindergarten entry that
provide standards-based education, which includes, but is not limited to, Head Start and state-funded preschool programs.
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turnaround schools better data is needed to help them determine whether early learning is the best use
of resources. But at some turnaround schools early learning will be a smart long-term investment, and
turnaround metrics should not discourage those schools from making that investment.
This paper frst examines how low-performing schools can greatly beneft from high-quality early
learning. It then argues that the next generation of turnaround metrics must include a diferent mix of
short- and long-term metrics that create the right incentives for early learning, including metrics that
address performance prior to 3rd grade accountability testing. The paper argues that when the federal
government and states fund turnaround eforts, they should ensure that the metrics they use to judge
their success do not discourage schools from using early learning as a long-term improvement strategy.
II. WHY EARLY LEARNING IS CRITICAL IN THE TURNAROUND CONTEXT
Turnaround schools are by defnition low-performing schools. In turnaround elementary schools,
children are often entering kindergarten already behind, meaning that high-quality early learning should
be an essential part of any long-term systemic solution. High-quality early learning has long-term impacts
on student achievement, can help strengthen parent and community engagement, and addresses a
signifcant issue that to date no other turnaround strategy has tackled: the gaps turnaround schools aim
to address emerge well before kindergarten entry.
A. The Achievement Gap Opens Before Kindergarten
Turnaround schools are starting out behind and playing catch-up from the frst day children walk into
kindergarten. Before entering kindergarten, the average cognitive scores of afuent preschool-aged
children are 60% above children in the lowest-income bracket.
2
Maryland is one of the states that has
been systematic about collecting school readiness data, and its data refects this disparity. Maryland
has made signifcant strides in the overall readiness of children entering kindergarten by expanding
access to half- and full-day public pre-kindergarten for families at or below 300% of poverty, investing
in innovative initiatives serving children birth to age 5, and making comprehensive improvements in
curricula, assessments, and accountability systems through the state’s Race to the Top-Early Learning
Challenge grant.
3
Still, at-risk groups—including English language learners and low-income children—
continue to lag behind their peers.
4
Other studies further indicate that the achievement gap surfaces during the earliest years and changes
relatively little after elementary school.
5
Children’s academic successes at ages 9 and 10 are set up
by the amount of talk they hear from birth to age 3. Findings from a groundbreaking study showed
that children from poor households enter kindergarten with a listening vocabulary of 3,000 words vs.
20,000 words from children in middle-income households.
6
The early achievement gap between low-
income children and their wealthier counterparts also has impact beyond the school age years into
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high school.
7
These fndings signify how pivotal early experiences can be especially for disadvantaged
children but also, importantly, how the learning gap manifests even prior to formal schooling.
B. The Impact of High-Quality Education in the Birth to 8 Years
1. Early Learning
In response to research showing the extent of the learning gap evident prior to kindergarten, there
have been increased eforts to provide high-quality early learning to help close the gap. Studies on
the impact of high-quality early learning programs have continued to demonstrate a wide range of
benefts for children and families, especially those living in poverty.
8
Key hallmarks of high-quality
early learning programs include ensuring strong program leadership, evidence-based practice and
integrated curriculum across child developmental domains, low staf-child ratio and small class sizes,
strong engagement with families, high staf qualifcations and intensive professional development,
and a safe and healthy child-friendly classroom environment.
9
These types of robust early learning
programs have been shown to produce positive efects on children’s cognitive skills, behavior, and
social and emotional outcomes.
10
A growing number of studies on early learning impacts have also
found efects on children’s readiness to learn, which lays the foundation for successful transition into
kindergarten.
11
Longitudinal fndings from model early childhood programs further point to long-term academic and
social benefts consisting of higher educational attainment and increased earnings, improved health,
more positive family relationships, and reductions in remedial education, crime, and receipt of public
assistance.
12
The strong gains produced from high-quality early learning thus signals its signifcance
in the education continuum and the valuable role it can have in developing strategies around school
turnaround.
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HIGH-QUALITY EARLY LEARNING THAT IS SAFE, HEALTHY, STIMULATING,
AND ORGANIZED, HELPS CHILDREN ENTER SCHOOL READY AND PROVIDES
THE FOUNDATION FOR SUCCESS IN SCHOOL AND LIFE. THE FOLLOWING ARE
SOME KEY FEATURES OF A QUALITY EARLY CHILDHOOD PROGRAM:
13
Educated, attentive, and engaged teachers and staf
• Teachers with four-year degrees and specifc training in early childhood education
• Teachers who crouch to eye-level to speak to children, and who hold, cuddle, show
afection,
and speak directly to infants and toddlers
• Families and teachers exchanging information about the child’s development
and learning progress
A safe, healthy, and child-friendly environment
• A room well-equipped with sufcient materials and toys
• Classrooms in which materials and activities are placed at eye level for the children
• Materials and toys accessible to children in an orderly display
• Centers that encourage safe, outdoor playtime
• Frequent hand-washing by children and adults
• Visitors welcomed with appropriate parental consent
Stimulating activities and appropriately structured routines
• Children who are engaged in their activities
• Children ofered breakfast and lunch and a time to nap
• Children participating with teachers and each other in individual, small-group,
and large-group activities
• Children receiving a variety of stimuli in their daily routine using indoor and outdoor
spaces and age-appropriate language, literacy, math, science, art, music, movement,
and dramatic play experiences
• Preschoolers who are allowed to play independently
To create this environment requires limiting class sizes and teacher-to-child ratios, generally
with no more than eight infants and toddlers and no more than 20 preschoolers in a classroom
as well as a teacher-to-child ratio of 1:3 for infants and 1:10 for preschoolers.
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2. Creating a Continuum with the Early Elementary Years
It is clear there is growing recognition that the early years up to age 8 (a child’s typical age by
3rd grade) are critical to children’s educational development and achievement, as children are
acquiring the foundational skills essential to their future success.
14
To sustain benefts attained
from quality early childhood experiences, gains made must be reinforced in the early elementary
grades. Research evidence indicates that reading profciency in the 3rd grade is a strong predictor
of high school graduation and career outcomes.
15
Over ¾ of children in poverty are at increased
risk of not graduating on time because they are not reading profciently by the end of 3rd grade.
16
A comprehensive learning continuum that builds on quality early childhood experiences and
connects birth through 3rd grade provides another opportunity to reduce the achievement gap
while connecting systems to nurture children’s learning and development.
17
Initiatives to align
early learning to 3rd grade focus on improving coordination across the learning continuum in
areas such as standards, curricula, assessment, instruction, teacher preparation, professional
development, and engagement among schools and early childhood community providers and
families.
18
A challenge in the early elementary grades is that there is in efect no real accountability for kinder-
garten through grade 2.
19
Research has shown that compared to teachers in the upper elementary
grades, K–2 teachers may have lower teacher quality measures with regard to credentials that
include years of experience, higher licensure scores, and National Board Certifcation. In fact, in
the schools with the most disadvantaged students, accountability pressures that give incentive
to assign stronger teachers to the upper grades are driving that distribution of teachers.
20
An
accountability system that focused more on professional practice and less on student test scores
would make it less likely that weak teachers would be reassigned to the early elementary grades.
At this time, however, no state has implemented such a system.
C. Early Learning As the Bedrock of Parent and Community Engagement
Turnaround schools are far less likely to succeed if their turnaround strategies focus solely on
“in-school” changes, and far more likely to succeed if they engage parents and the community.
High-quality early learning can help provide a strong foundation for long-term parental and
community engagement. Accordingly, early learning is a potentially critical piece of creating the
kind of parent and community buy-in needed for a school turnaround to succeed in the long term.
1. Parent and Community Engagement is Critical to School Turnaround
Engaging parents and communities is a critical part of school success.
21
A robust support system
that involves engaged families has meaningful impact on children’s cognitive, social, and emotional
development and learning success—and can be especially important for disadvantaged children.
22
A growing body of research has found that strong social support fosters student motivation in
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school, encourages confdence, and increases the likelihood of academic achievement and successful
post-secondary transition.
23
Students who attend turnaround schools are largely low-income
24
and
experience a range of obstacles that make positive relationships with parents and other adults
paramount to their success in education and life.
25
Students with high needs perform better in
school when their families become involved in school activities, further supporting the value of
family engagement in schools as a means for enhancing the academic achievement of low-income
students.
26
This is a key element of “readiness to learn” on the Mass Insight Readiness Triangle (seen
on page 9), which recognizes that turnaround schools must be sensitive to the context students face
outside of school.
27
As turnaround schools and schools with similar challenges interact with students’ environments, they
must continue to foster relationships with key adult fgures—including parents and families—as well
as extend their reach into students’ broader community settings. The community school model is
becoming more prevalent in school improvement. Community schools leverage the school’s physical
space to provide nontraditional supports to students and families within its setting, including health
care, parent education, social services, and community engagement activities.
28
Partnering with
community resources and using the school to build stronger connections among students, families,
and community members supports the students’ development and readiness to learn. Additionally it
bolsters the school environment and its network of community relationships.
29
On the macro level, creating stronger ties and communication channels with communities has far-
reaching implications for poor-performing schools that can pave the path for school improvement.
Recent initiatives by states and school districts to incorporate family and community engagement in
school improvement show that strategies that prioritize engagement eforts and create opportunities
for parents and community members to genuinely participate in schools and decision-making
processes can make a diference in building community-school connections.
30
Schools that have
connected with local community groups to generate increased engagement, for instance, have
experienced enriched school-community networks, school climate, teacher-parent ties, teacher
instruction and professional capacity, and increased student academic achievement.
31
Additionally,
research fndings indicate that school-community collaborations have helped to shape education
policy decisions and innovations that have boosted school and district-level resources and capacity.
32
While substantial evidence points to the important benefts of involved families and community
partners in schools, schools serving largely underserved minority populations have generally struggled
in this arena.
33
Regardless of the challenges that exist, a strong network of family and community
support and resources throughout the educational pipeline plays a signifcant role in the success of
each and every student, especially those whose development is infuenced by the efects of poverty.
34
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2. Early Learning Can Provide a Foundation for Long-Term
Parent and Community Engagement
High-quality early learning is designed to build partnerships
to ensure that responsibility for a child’s education is shared
among the teacher and school, the family, and the community.
Head Start, for example, funds dedicated family and community
engagement initiatives focused on mobilizing school staf,
parents, and community leaders together to promote children’s
healthy development and learning.
35
The federal Race to the
Top-Early Learning Challenge has pushed states to include
family engagement practices in the development of early
learning systems.
36
High-quality early childhood programs such
as Educare Schools have also incorporated intensive family
engagement as part of their comprehensive model. These
programs provide tailored support for individual families and promote practices that help to foster
the parent-child relationship along with the parent’s role as an efective advocate on behalf of their
child’s development and education.
37
Programs have also sought to utilize new parent and community
engagement models in the transition to kindergarten.
38
Early learning systems also seek to connect educational services with health and human services
providers, which can help strengthen community ties. Developing relationships and alliances with
community partners and social service providers can help to address health and human service needs
that have signifcant impact on young students’ daily functioning in and out of the classroom.
39
These
varying needs range from access to adequate meals to health care check-ups and immunizations to
safe and secure housing, which individually as well as collectively, play a role in advancing student
learning and success in school and later life.
40
Studies indicate that in these connections in the early childhood years, families feel welcomed to the
schooling enterprise, but this sense changes in elementary school when school contact becomes more
formalized.
41
Thoughtful integration of early learning in school turnaround eforts thus provides an
opportunity to bridge gaps in family and community engagement at the on-set and builds upon the
efort to have parents, families, and communities as genuine partners throughout a child’s education.
These partnerships lay the groundwork for a child’s learning trajectory and a school’s long-term
success by helping families prepare to connect with their child’s elementary school and providing
schools with early opportunities to form collaborative relationships with the young children and
families they serve. Further, during times of transition, links between school and home are especially
important to a child’s learning experiences. Families and communities are thus key to helping
ensure a smooth transition from early childhood into kindergarten and the elementary years
42
and
promoting a child’s school readiness, which is strongly associated with 3rd grade test scores and later
readiness to
ACT
readiness to
LEARN
readiness to
TEACH
In The Turnaround Challenge, Mass Insight
Education identifed three key dynamics for
how high-performing, high-poverty schools
attain high student achievement.
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achievement.
43
Involvement in such early transitions can shape future school engagement as families
and communities participate in processes that foster confdence, skill, knowledge, and connection
that can be essential to engagement in education.
44
III. CURRENT TURNAROUND FUNDING AND ACCOUNTABILITY
Federal investments to support school improvement eforts have largely focused on turning around the
lowest-performing schools quickly enough to show measurable improvement within three years, with
“success” measured by indicators chosen by the state. Generally states have chosen student achievement
scores on required accountability tests (which begin in 3rd grade) as a primary metric—which is to be
expected, given that those accountability tests are a key success metric for all schools. But by focusing
the metrics of success on 3rd grade and later, these turnaround metrics present a signifcant disincentive
to investment in early learning. This section examines the resources available to turnaround schools,
describes the approaches currently used in states, and then explains how those approaches discourage
the use of early learning in school turnaround.
A. Federal Resources for Turnaround Schools
The US Department of Education allocates a great deal of funding for incentive-based grants to turn
around persistently low-performing schools, such as Title I, the American Recovery and Reinvestment
Act (ARRA), Race to the Top, and School Improvement Grants (SIG). Other than Title I, districts usually
become eligible for such grants based on the performance of individual schools, which are identifed
based on testing in 3rd grade and beyond. These funding streams can be used for early learning,
although they generally are not.
45
Upon receiving any of these grants, schools across the country
are given various timeframes to show improvement—and they tend to focus most resources on the
grades immediately refected in those standardized tests to gain quick wins and demonstrate positive
impacts from the increased funding.
School Improvement Grants
SIG is perhaps the most widely known incentive fund within the Department of Education. The
grant—announced in winter 2009 as a $3.5 billion budget appropriation—requires state education
agencies (SEAs) to identify the bottom 5% of all Title I schools. The Department of Education awards
SIG funding to SEAs based on a formula that allocates SIG money in proportion to funds already
received by the SEA under Parts A, C, and D of Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act
(ESEA). The SEAs are then responsible for allocating the dollars through a formula (e.g., dividing the
lump sum by the number of schools in the upcoming school improvement cohort) or competitive
process (using proposals based of an SEA-issued RFP and awarding grants based on quality of plan
and need) to local education agencies and schools.
46
SEAs are required to allocate at least 95% of
the SIG funding they receive from the Department of Education to districts, and can use the rest for
discretionary spending in Title I schools or districts. To be eligible for the SIG 1003(g) funding, schools
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must be identifed as persistently low-achieving and have had to implement one of four turnaround
models: transformation, turnaround, closure, or restart.
47
On September 8, 2014, the Department of
Education proposed to add new models, including a whole-school model and a model focused on
implementing preschool and full-day kindergarten.
48
THE FOUR TURNAROUND MODELS
TURNAROUND MODEL: Replace the principal and rehire no more than 50% of the staf,
and grant the principal sufcient operational fexibility (including in stafng, calendars/
time and budgeting) to fully implement a comprehensive approach to substantially
improve student outcomes.
RESTART MODEL: Convert a school or close and reopen it under a charter school
operator, a charter management organization, or an education management
organization that has been selected through a rigorous review process.
SCHOOL CLOSURE: Close a school and enroll the students who attended that school
in other schools in the district that are higher achieving.
TRANSFORMATION MODEL: Implement each of the following strategies: (1) replace the
principal and take steps to increase teacher and school leader efectiveness; (2) institute
comprehensive instructional reforms; (3) increase learning time and create community-
oriented schools; and (4) provide operational fexibility and sustained support.
49
Current research does not point to any one model as being more efective than the others,
50
although
early data suggests that the more dramatic interventions—namely restart and turnaround—lead to
more rapid student achievement growth.
51
Data shows that the transformation model is the most
often applied of the four turnaround options. Researchers and practitioners agree it is the least
controversial and least bold of the four models.
SIG grants typically run for three years, although the new proposed regulations would allow them
to run for fve years. For many schools, the 2012-2013 school year marked the end of the three-year
cycle. In some states, schools’ SIG grants may be rescinded before the three-year cycle is completed
facing a lack of proof of improvement, or principals may be removed and replaced when data does
not show progress toward predetermined gains.
More recently, Congress folded in language to the fscal year 2014 budget that make signifcant
changes to the SIG by paving the way for more state and district fexibility. Under the measure, states
can develop their own intervention plans for school improvement and submit them to Department
of Education for approval. Further, states would have the option to implement the “whole school
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reform” model, which would allow schools to partner with organizations on interventions that
show moderate evidence of success. States can also ofer more implementation fexibility for rural
schools. Additionally, the new language stretches the grants for states from three to fve years.
52
The
Department’s September 2014 proposed rules would further codify these changes.
ESEA Waivers and Flexibility
In fall of 2011, President Obama’s administration announced that it would grant waivers to states for
fexibility under the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act’s (NCLB) expectations.
53
The waiver process allows
states to redefne their accountability systems to include a combination of profciency and measures
of student learning growth as well as expand accountability to other subjects beyond math and
English; it also allowed states to add more indicators beyond test scores, although most did not.
54
To
receive fexibility from the NCLB provisions, states must commit to implementing college-and-career-
ready standards and assessments, using diferentiated accountability, increasing support for efective
instruction and leadership (including new evaluation systems), and working to reduce unnecessary
burdens on SEAs and their schools. States are granted new fexibilities, including potential changes to
how they identify and support their lowest-performing schools.
Through waiver accountability, states are required to designate low-performing schools as “priority
schools” and “focus schools” whose performance needs improving, and must also recognize high-
performing or progressing “reward schools.”
55
A priority school is defned as a school meeting at
least one of the following characteristics: It is among the lowest 5% of Title I schools within the
state according to both achievement and “all student groups” progress data; it is a Title I-eligible
or Title I-participating high school with a recurring graduation rate of less than 60%; or it is a Tier I
or Tier II SIG school currently receiving SIG funding. The defning characteristics of a focus school
are centered on achievement gaps, or subgroup performance. Focus schools either have the state’s
largest achievement gaps between the highest- and lowest-achieving subgroups within the school (or
graduation rates for high schools), or have any particular subgroup with especially low achievement
or graduation rates.
Once those schools are identifed, schools or state agencies are given the option to use one of the
four turnaround models to make improvements—or they can design their own interventions and
implement strategies and supports that meet the needs of priority and focus schools.
56
The US
Department of Education requires the use of seven “Turnaround Principles,” which include actions
such as placing an efective principal in the building and redesigning the school day to include time
in the day for teachers and administrators to collaborate around use of data.
57
The principles include
structural, leadership, and cultural changes that the state must ensure the schools implement as
turnaround interventions. These school improvement eforts must be meaningful and aim to enhance
student learning and close achievement gaps across student groups.
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B. Current State Approaches to Turnaround Accountability
1. Measuring Performance
Within the federal framework for school turnaround, states are given discretion to set the metrics
for what constitutes turnaround success. In some states, the metrics are standardized across the
state, and local turnaround leaders must craft school improvement plans aligned to these metrics;
Connecticut, New Jersey, and Virginia are examples of states that use this approach.
58
By contrast,
in some states local turnaround leaders propose metrics that the state then considers for approval;
Pennsylvania and Wyoming are two examples of states using this approach.
59
Under either of these two approaches, the metrics of turnaround success have heavily emphasized
standardized assessment scores in their metrics for turnaround success—consistent with their
overall approach to accountability.
60
State accountability systems are primarily driven by school
performance on standardized tests, which are administered starting in 3rd grade.
61
Because it is
those accountability systems that initially identify schools for turnaround, it is only logical that those
same accountability systems would also be used as a gauge of turnaround success. Moreover, in
the waivers the Department of Education required criteria for exiting “priority and “focus” status
that demonstrate an improvement in both graduation rates and test scores for all students and
subgroups—specifcally, meeting annual measurable objectives (AMOs) in reading and mathematics
profciency rates.
62
The overall success of a turnaround is measured primarily in terms of a state accountability system,
but additional metrics are frequently used to gauge performance in a more comprehensive manner.
Whether the state is determining the metrics itself or approving local proposals, the metrics generally
include indicators refecting school environment and student performance, capturing both qualitative
and quantitate measures. Some states also include a focus on qualitative metrics, identifying positive
changes in school climate and culture as a major step forward in turnaround. The 5Essentials Survey
developed for Illinois by the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research has been
used to identify changes in leadership styles, family involvement, and general school environment.
63
While the federal government gives states fexibility in which indicators it uses to measure turnaround
success, the Department of Education does require the collection of certain key indicators. Beyond
descriptive data required of all schools, schools receiving School Improvement Grants also collect 14
general indicators that include average scale scores on subject tests, student and teacher attendance
rates, minutes in the school year, and teacher evaluation information.
64
States may also choose to
collect data beyond what the Department of Education asks for; some states provide a list of indicators
to schools and districts, and allow them to choose the metrics most pertinent to their growth. For
example, a school struggling with high rates of disciplinary infractions (e.g., suspensions, expulsions)
may want to specifcally track ofce visits and classroom culture data.
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The School Improvement Grant, which most states’ turnaround schools receive, utilizes metrics
that focus on indicators that are both leading and lagging indicators. Leading indicators are metrics
that typically predict the outcome and show up quickly, such as the number of minutes in a school
day, student dropout rate, student attendance rate, and the number of students participating on
state assessments. Lagging indicators are metrics that take longer to show up, including student
achievement on state assessments, college enrollment rates, and graduation rates. These indicators
have been used in diferent combinations to identify schools for turnaround, measure the progress
of turnarounds, and determine whether schools can exit turnaround status (with assessment scores
and graduation rates the primary drivers, as noted).
Over the course of turnaround, SEAs track school progress in diferent ways. For example, Virginia uses
the Indistar system to track school progress and fdelity of implementation—essentially, whether the
schools are doing what they said they would. Virginia also assigns state staf as liaisons to individual
schools or districts to serve as a direct line to the State Turnaround Ofce; similar systems are used
in other states, like Florida and New Jersey. Rhode Island takes performance monitoring a step
further, using the small size of the state to its advantage to host biweekly meetings with principals
and superintendents from low-performing schools. At these meetings, the Rhode Island Department
of Education presents the district and school leaders with data specifc to their schools, and facilitates
a discussion about what the data means, and what might need to change to improve future results. In
some other states, this type of deep review of the data may take place annually to evaluate whether
the school is on a trajectory to meet its performance targets.
2. Taking Action Based on Results
Federal law authorizes states to take action if turnaround schools do not meet performance targets,
but does not require it.
65
Some states’ legislation allows them to close the school or restart it as a
charter; some states have even created “extraordinary authority districts,” which give states signifcant
power and capacity to take over and operate continually underperforming districts or schools.
66
While legislation in many states authorizes state takeovers, in many states the state education agency
is reluctant to use that authority. When Mass Insight interviewed SEA turnaround leads, district
turnaround leaders, and school turnaround principals in eight diferent states, many admitted that
their SEA turnaround ofces did not have the capacity to take over a school even when the data
leaves no choice, and instead will cycle in new leadership or rebuild leadership capacity. Other states
will instead turn to pulling SIG funding when a school is not exhibiting fdelity of implementation to
their approved improvement plan or is simply repeatedly failing to improve. These decisions are
often made by an SEA ofce such as federal programs, school turnaround, or school improvement.
In the end, many states are fnding it difcult to act upon school improvement implementation after
becoming an ESEA waiver state. Difculties range from lacking fnancial capacity to monitor districts
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with fdelity, to waiver statutes conficting with preexisting state law. In some cases, logistics are proving
to be major obstacles. For example, Virginia was unable to comply with the frst Turnaround Principle
(requiring an efective school leader be in place). As required by Virginia state law, an inefective
principal in a priority school must be notifed of imminent removal by June; however the schools were
not labeled priority until later in the summer. As a result, the state was forced to wait until the end of
the following school year to take action against the inefective principals. This discrepancy between
state and federal law causes state education ofcials to struggle with getting the best conditions in
place for students.
67
C. Why Early Learning Doesn’t Make Sense Under the Current Incentive Structure
While the ability of federal turnaround funds to support actions that improve student outcomes is as
of yet unproven,
68
we know that federal requirements have enormous power to drive local spending.
And in this case, the incentives are aligned to point one way: away from early learning.
In any turnaround strategy where test scores in 3rd grade and upward are the key metric of success,
early learning will be discouraged. Take the hypothetical of a turnaround school that, in year one of
its turnaround, institutes a preschool program for 4-year-olds. Those children will not take 3rd grade
accountability tests until year fve of the turnaround program—at which point their impact on the
success or failure of the turnaround efort will be minimal at best. Furthermore, because schools
will frequently have multiple cohorts of students whose test scores are being used for accountability
purposes, the impact of those preschool-educated children on a turnaround school’s performance
may be minimal.
Of course, this hypothetical assumes that a successful 4-year-old preschool program is instituted in
year one of a turnaround; research shows that high quality is needed to have long-term impacts,
69
which can be difcult to achieve in year one of a turnaround. Moreover, research also shows that the
most efective interventions for the children with the greatest needs are those that last for more than
one year.
70
As noted earlier, many children will have fallen behind long before entering a 4-year-old
preschool classroom,
71
suggesting that for many turnaround schools a 4-year-old preschool program
may help incrementally but will not necessarily deliver dramatic change in the profle of incoming
kindergartners.
These challenges are only magnifed by the leadership turnover experienced by all schools, particularly
turnaround schools, because leaders with short tenures may not be in a position to focus on long-
term strategies. Research on principal efectiveness has indicated that it takes on average fve years
to put into place a teaching staf in addition to fully implementing policies and practices that will have
a positive efect on school performance.
72
Yet, principal tenure averages only three to four years in
a standard performing school
73
and even less for low-performing schools.
74
A study of principals in
Tier III turnaround schools in Arizona showed that the majority had tenure of three years or fewer.
75
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Tenure is also low for superintendents in large urban school districts: A 2010 survey of urban district
leaders found that superintendents averaged approximately three and a half years on the job.
76
If
superintendents and principals do not reasonably expect to be on the job for fve years, they may
be unlikely to favor strategies that take at least fve years to pay of, and more likely to focus on
strategies that show more immediate impact on their key metrics.
Child mobility only makes it harder for local leaders to think of preschoolers as a worthwhile long-
term investment. Research on school change indicates that just over half of kindergarteners remain
in the same school by the end of 3rd grade, while over one-third will change schools at least once
between kindergarten and 3rd grade.
77
The mobility rate is even higher in the lowest-performing
schools,
78
where high mobility is associated with disadvantaged and low-income status.
79
In part
because of higher mobility in high-needs schools, superintendents and principals in turnaround
settings may reasonably calculate that putting turnaround resources into early learning will not
serve as an efective strategy in a plan for short-term school improvement, because a meaningful
percentage of the children served may end up moving elsewhere. Adopting new accountability in the
K–2 grades would allow turnaround schools to see at least some short-term beneft from the early
learning investment in their accountability metrics during the K–2 years. Even if leaders of turnaround
schools with high rates of mobility doubt that early learning investment may not help them achieve
their accountability metrics, the state has a signifcant interest in seeing children beneft from high-
quality early learning: many of the children that change schools may move within a district or across
districts but remain within the state.
80
This means that if anything, the state should be creating positive
incentives for early learning investment.
In sum, while the children themselves and the system as a whole may beneft from the provision
of high-quality early learning, the improved child outcome results supported by early learning do
not currently impact the metrics for which key turnaround decision-makers are held accountable.
81
Accordingly, those key decision-makers are in many instances making the rationally self-interested
choice to invest elsewhere. The only way to fundamentally change the level of early learning investment
in turnaround schools is to change the orientation of turnaround decision-makers’ rational self-
interest.
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IV. REDESIGNING THE SYSTEM
Fundamentally changing how turnaround metrics infuence implementation will require action at the
federal, state, and local level. This section proposes actions that leaders at all of those levels can take to
change the way turnarounds are implemented, with the goal of utilizing high-quality early learning as a
long-term strategy for school improvement. The recommendations are written to be at least somewhat
independent, so that stakeholders and decision-makers at any level can act independently; that said,
clearly the change will be most dramatic if all of these actions are taken together.
A. The Federal Government Can Be Tighter on Goals, Flexible on Means
1. Requiring Early Learning as Part of Goal-Setting
US Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, has often expressed a desire to be “tight on goals, loose on
means”
82
—setting clear targets but giving local actors the fexibility to determine how to meet those
targets. In school turnaround, however, federal policies have largely been just the opposite: States
(and often school districts) are allowed to set their own goals for turnaround schools but are given
prescriptive models for how to achieve those goals. While the means have been made more fexible
in recent years,
83
the federal government could do more to help ensure that states, districts, and
schools are setting the right goals.
The federal government could take an important step toward enhancing the incentives to include
early learning in school turnaround eforts by requiring states to set goals for improving early learning
and early elementary grade performance as part of any federally funded turnaround efort. The exact
goals can vary by states given diferences in overall state accountability systems and approaches. But
it would be appropriate for the federal government to require that states have those goals, which
would shape resource use and local decision-making in turnaround work. The goals would need to
be grounded in revised accountability metrics (as discussed in IV.B.3 below), with a focus on both
improved professional performance and improved child outcomes.
A major purpose of school turnaround is to create rapid improvement in school performance—
essentially, to break and reset the school’s trajectory. But changing a school’s trajectory matters at
least as much before 3rd grade as it does after. Most of the hard work of turning around a school
takes place at the state and local level, so the best role the federal government can play to shape that
work is to ensure that state and local turnaround leaders are addressing the issue of kindergarten
readiness and early elementary performance.
2. Providing Dedicated Funds for Early Learning
Another approach that the federal government has been asked to consider is to provide targeted
funding, through SIG or some other sources, to support early learning as part of turnaround
packages, or incentives to use Title I funds to support early learning (which is already permitted).
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While dedicated funding for efective early learning is generally a good thing, there is a risk that
separate funding streams supporting early learning in turnaround schools that are not tied to the
primary outcomes of the turnaround efort will turn early learning into a side project, rather than a
core focus of the turnaround work. The most efective early learning programs will be those that are
of high quality and well aligned to improved K–2 eforts, and while that is possible through a separate
dedicated funding stream, it is less likely if the overall metrics of success in turnaround do not track
progress before 3rd grade. Accordingly, dedicating turnaround funds for early learning is far more
likely to be efective if the goals of the turnaround include a focus on successful preparation for
kindergarten entry and achievement in the early elementary years.
It is also worth noting that dedicating federal funds to early learning represents tightness on means
rather than goals. Increasing spending on early learning in school turnaround is a strategy, not a goal,
and at the federal level, the appropriate focus is on the goal—improved child outcomes—rather than
the strategy.
85
Dedicating a set percentage of school turnaround funds for early learning would be an
improvement over the current situation, but the more impactful course of action would be to change
the incentives that afect all decisions about school turnaround funds—so that early learning would
be a logical investment for local leaders charged with allocating those funds.
3. Creating an Early Learning Turnaround Model
On September 8, 2014, the US Department of Education proposed new regulations governing the
School Improvement Grant program.
86
The proposal includes the creation of an early learning model
for school turnaround, which represents an important recognition by the Department of Education
of the role that early learning can play in improving long-term school outcomes.
87
The model requires
implementing districts to provide full-day kindergarten, high-quality preschool, and joint planning
across grades, in addition to other requirements similar or identical to the requirements of other
models.
88
The major limitation of the Department’s approach is that it creates a framework for implementing
early learning in turnaround without changing the incentives to do so. It is true that the regulations
also extend the period of turnaround from three to fve years,
89
which gives children in early learning
more time to work through the system—but still, preschoolers from year one of a turnaround will
only enter 3rd grade in the ffth year of a turnaround, meaning that the impact of preschool on
turnaround metrics is still marginal. Accordingly, creating this model without changing the metrics
by which turnarounds are judged will mean schools have no additional motivation to support early
learning, even if they now have a more explicit mechanism for doing so.
90
Amending the means
without changing the goals is unlikely to yield substantial new investment of turnaround funds in
early learning.
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B. States Can Develop and Use Better Data to Shape Local Action
While all turnaround schools have low overall performance, the nature of the problems—and most
promising solutions—may vary widely from school to school. Accordingly, one important role of the
state is to ensure that turnaround eforts are based on an accurate diagnosis of the problems, and
include strategies reasonably calculated to address those problems. There are several data-based
strategies states can support that help maximize the likelihood of success in their turnaround eforts.
1. Quantify the Kindergarten Entry Gap in Turnaround Schools
One important strategy turnaround schools can use is assessments that help them understand
the knowledge and skill base of their incoming kindergarteners. In some states, kindergarten entry
assessments are already in widespread use; in others, they are under development.
91
Even in states
without a statewide kindergarten entry assessment, states could ensure that turnaround schools are
using kindergarten entry assessments to understand children’s development, abilities, and knowledge
prior to entering kindergarten. Kindergarten entry assessments can beneft educators by ofering
a baseline snapshot of children’s readiness that can be meaningfully used to support instruction,
promote program alignment and improvement, and enhance learning environments.
92
It can also
give school personnel and families valuable information on children’s learning and development as
they move through kindergarten into successive grades and acquire new concepts and skills.
93
Leading experts have cautioned against using kindergarten entry assessment to evaluate the
efectiveness of individual early learning providers.
94
It is appropriate, however, to use kindergarten
entry assessment to inform how best to use resources in a turnaround setting. For example, if the
assessments show that children are developmentally behind at kindergarten entry, that indicates that
the school may greatly beneft from an early learning strategy to help close the early achievement
gap. On the fip side, if the kindergarten entry assessments show more promising results than 3rd
grade assessments, schools might focus resources primarily on addressing disparities in the early
elementary years. Of course, at many schools both kindergarten entry and K–2 performance will be
an issue, but kindergarten entry assessment results will help turnaround leaders understand the
scope of the problem and target resource- across the birth to 3rd grade spectrum.
2. Identify Child Early Learning Experiences
One challenge that elementary schools face is that their incoming kindergarteners have had a
wide variety of experiences during their preschool years. In some turnaround schools, many of the
children may have received state-funded preschool or Head Start—but not necessarily from the same
providers. In some schools, children may have largely been in child care settings, either center-based
or home-based.
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The challenge of turnaround schools having to serve children coming from multiple settings is not
unique to elementary schools because many turnaround high schools and middle schools have
multiple feeder schools as well. But the challenge is far greater in elementary school. The early learning
landscape is incredibly diverse, and importantly, in many communities, only a small percentage of
children are served by the programs run through a school district.
95
In addition, most early learning
programs operate without the attendance boundaries that most public schools use,
96
so the children
entering a given turnaround elementary school may have received early learning services in other
communities.
The frst step to addressing this challenge is quantifying it. Turnaround schools should identify what
early learning experiences their entering kindergarteners are coming from.
Having that information
can then shape a school’s strategy for engaging the early learning community. For example, if a
given school’s entering kindergarteners come primarily from a small number of Head Start or state
preschool providers, the school can build a strategy focused on partnership with those providers.
If the entering class comes from a broader range of settings and early learning experiences, then
diferent strategies may be needed. (Local strategies are discussed further in subsection IV.C below.)
Having this information is an essential frst step in the process, however, and turnaround schools
should be required to undertake it as part of their work plan—potentially with assistance from the
state, regional entities, or their district.
3. Create Metrics for Early Success
Whether the federal government requires states to defne metrics of school turnaround success
focused on improving early learning and early elementary performance, states can require such
metrics in local turnarounds. States have the choice of either defning the metrics themselves or
requiring each turnaround school to defne the metric itself, as described in III.B.1. Presumably states
will approach this issue in the same manner they approach the larger question of setting turnaround
metrics.
Accountability for turnaround success should focus on the same two goals that accountability
systems writ large should focus on: improving professional practice and improving child outcomes.
97
Importantly, there must be metrics that allow progress toward these goals to be measured in
kindergarten through 2nd grade, so that the impact of early learning can be felt within the frst
three years of the turnaround. In the birth through 2nd grade years, the balance between these two
categories should be weighted toward professional practice, in part because it can be measured
more consistently. This is essential for the purpose of having external validators declare that a school
has made sufcient progress to exit turnaround status.
• Measures of school-wide professional practice should broadly encompass the range of activities
that successful schools engage in. A research-based framework for doing so has been identifed
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by the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research (as noted in III.B.1), and
includes fve “essential elements”: school instructional guidance systems, professional capacity,
parent-community-school ties, the learning climate, and school leadership to drive change.
98
Using these metrics involves external reviewers evaluating schools, which is already a part of
some states’ turnaround process.
99
• Child outcome metrics for children prior to 3rd grade should be ones that are developmentally
appropriate, that measure progress along critical developmental domains, and that can be
externally validated. At this point, existing child assessments that meet these standards were
not designed for purposes of school-level accountability. For now, in the early years, measures
of professional practice should account for well more than 50% of a school’s accountability.
– One example of a metric that might be used is chronic absentee rate. Research has shown
that young children and adolescents who are chronically absent learn less and develop
fewer skills during the school year and experience lower overall academic performance.
Chronic absence in preschool and the early elementary grades is strongly linked to chronic
absenteeism in later years.
100
Chronic absentee rate is already being used as a metric by
the California CORE districts in their ESEA waiver.
101
– While there are some measures that can be used already to measure child learning and
development prior to 3rd grade, the state of the art is emerging, and more work is needed
in this area.
102
Though leading early childhood researchers have cautioned against
using child assessments as accountability measures,
103
existing tools—including
kindergarten readiness assessments, and nationally-normed tool such as the Peabody
Picture Vocabulary Test
104
(measuring receptive vocabulary) and the Woodcock-Johnson-III
105
(measuring cognitive abilities)—have increasingly been used in research and early learning
settings to examine child outcomes. Thus, while these child assessment results should not
be used to determine whether a school should remain in turnaround status, they should
be used by leaders in turnaround schools (and non-turnaround schools) as an important
gauge of child progress.
Within these categories, to the extent possible, metrics of turnaround improvement should be aligned
to the diagnosis that led to the school’s placement in turnaround status, so that the metrics measure
the school’s progress in whatever areas were identifed as needing improvement.
Using metrics for turnaround accountability focused on the birth through 2nd grade years is essential
to getting turnaround schools to focus on instructional quality and child outcomes in these years. If
these factors are weighted as heavily (or more heavily) then test scores in later years, it will create
strong incentives for turnaround schools to focus on the quality of the early learning experiences of
their future students, the quality of coordination between the school and early learning providers,
and the quality of instruction in kindergarten through 2nd grade. Improving in these areas will not
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help schools with their 3rd grade test scores within three years of launching a turnaround, but they
can help change the long-term prognosis for student success in the turnaround school.
States should also emphasize the importance of rigorously evaluating the impact and quality of early
learning interventions in the turnaround context. While efective early learning interventions can be
meaningful, part of operating in the turnaround context is making sure that all strategies (including
early learning) are also carefully evaluated. If early learning strategies are not demonstrating their
intended efect, then an alternative approach should be taken.
C. Local Schools Can Provide Services and Coordinate with Partners
Schools and school districts support early learning in multiple ways. One important method is as a direct
provider: Many schools provide Head Start or preschool (funded either by the federal government or
state or local funds), and some go beyond that to provide additional early childhood services. Another
important method is being active contributors to the local early learning community, whether or not a
school is a direct service provider. How a school approaches each of these methods should be shaped
by available resources and community need.
1. Schools Can Be Direct Service Providers
Some turnaround schools are already direct providers of preschool and infant/toddler services
(including Head Start and Early Head Start) through some combination of federal, state, and local
funds. Whether a school is currently providing early learning, part of developing its turnaround plan
should be assessing whether to increase its early learning oferings. If a school’s analysis shows that
its kindergarteners are developmentally behind, and many of its kindergarteners have not had access
to efective early learning, then the school should strongly consider expanding its early learning
services—and ensuring that any services it does provide are of sufcient quality and duration to meet
the needs of families and have an educational impact. There are multiple approaches schools can take
to expand access to quality preschool, either through adding new classrooms or improving the quality
of existing classrooms, in a manner integrated into the overall approach to school improvement:
• Use school turnaround funds. These fexible funds can be used for early learning, but generally
have not been. The reason, of course, has frequently been that those funds were spent on
strategies that had an immediate impact on turnaround metrics. If the metrics of turnaround are
changed to include early learning and early elementary performance, then these fexible funds
can be used on early learning as a strategy that can have an immediate impact on how the school
performs under those metrics.
• Aggressively seek available federal and state funding. This opportunity may not be available in
all states, but in states where state-funded preschool is expanding it may well be a viable option—
either through a state formula or a grant application process.
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• Reprioritize other fexible funds such as general state aid, local property tax funds, or
Title I dollars. This approach is difcult because turnaround schools have many needs, but if an
analysis has shown that children are entering kindergarten behind, it may be possible to make the
case for repurposing funds in this manner.
Before expanding the number of early learning classrooms a school provides directly, it should also
survey the early childhood landscape in the community. It may be that in some instances, the provider
best equipped for rapid expansion is not the school itself but a private provider or Head Start grantee.
Every community’s needs and resources will be diferent, so analysis and communication will be
critical for schools seeking to fund direct expansion. One option that many districts have used is to
use district funds to provide services through private providers, and there are numerous models that
can be efective depending on state law and local context.
106
2. Schools Can Partner with Community Providers to Improve Quality and Access
Even if a turnaround school has no new funds to dedicate to expanding access to early learning, it can
improve the efectiveness of its partnerships in the community to create a more seamless continuum
of learning. There are a number of practices schools can engage in that improve the experience for
children enrolling in kindergarten:
• Efective transition planning that focuses on children’s movement through the learning continuum,
particularly during the shift from prekindergarten to kindergarten.
107
To help sustain gains from
early learning, a smooth transition plan must ensure the readiness of children for school, readiness
of schools to serve children, and readiness of families and communities to support children.
108
This can include intentional time for transition practices, data alignment and transfers, and clear
communications about transition processes for parents.
• Aligned curriculum and assessments between and within pre-kindergarten and kindergarten,
including cross-training for teachers. These linkages have important implications for how children
experience continuity and should be aimed at what is meaningful to children’s learning and
development.
109
• Efective, aligned professional development for early learning and K–12 teachers that emphasizes
the full birth to 3rd grade continuum. Professional development should be high quality and
ongoing in its approach. For example, professional development at Educare Schools is built into
the program structure and occurs routinely. The Educare professional development model focuses
on intensive embedded staf development, an interdisciplinary approach, and refective practice
and supervision.
110
Joint opportunities for professional development including both preschool and
K–2 teachers can also help create a smoother educational continuum.
• Quality family and community engagement is an essential component to supporting and advancing
young children’s learning, as referenced in Part II.C. Schools can help to foster the notion that this
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transition is a shared responsibility among many individuals and institutions. It is also a process
that all partners experience and not only an event that occurs to a child.
111
Schools with students coming from a diverse array of early childhood experiences may face diferent
challenges to engaging in these practices compared to schools that draw a high percentage of their
students from a small number of early learning providers. Regardless of the number of partnerships
involved, however, schools must continue to work closely with communities. By developing strong
connections with local providers and the larger community, schools recognize the dynamic nature
of relationships involved in the successful transition of a child from early learning to elementary
school.
112
How schools approach their relationships with community providers may vary somewhat depending
on the district’s provision for school choice. Elementary schools in districts where attendance
boundaries largely defne enrollment may have an easier time approaching early learning providers
in their catchment area because those providers will know that their children will likely end up in that
public school. In contrast, elementary schools in districts with strong choice provisions may have
stronger incentives to form meaningful partnerships with high-quality early learning providers and
engage in instructional alignment eforts, which could lead to parents of children enrolled in those
early learning programs choosing to send their child to that elementary school.
V. CONCLUSION
Early learning is an important strategy for improving the lowest-performing schools, but the current
incentive structure in school turnaround is set up to discourage the use of this strategy. By changing how
the success of turnaround eforts are measured, turnaround leaders—at the federal, state, and district
level—can change the practices used in turnaround schools to increase the percentage of children who
enter kindergarten ready to succeed. Improving kindergarten readiness is a strategy with signifcant
potential to permanently improve long-term child outcomes in turnaround schools, so creating incentives
that support kindergarten readiness are a critical change to school turnaround eforts—one that could
substantially boost the likelihood that once schools have been turned around once, they will remain on
the right trajectory.
Importantly, the problem of accountability structures setting the wrong incentives for early learning is
not one limited to turnaround schools. While non-turnaround schools may not face quite the same level
of pressure to improve dramatically in three to fve years, they too are accountable primarily for their
test scores in 3rd grade and up. What makes the turnaround context special is the required timeline for
improvement, and the additional resources provided to make that rapid improvement. But there is no
question that lessons to be learned from changing the accountability metrics for turnaround schools are
ones that could potentially be meaningful throughout the public education system.
CHANGING THE METRICS OF TURNAROUND TO ENCOURAGE EARLY LEARNING STRATEGIES 25
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ENDNOTES
1 The authors are grateful to their many colleagues at the Ounce of Prevention Fund and Mass Insight Education
who reviewed and commented on drafts of this paper. The authors are also thankful for input from their external
reviewers: Madeleine Bayard, Laura Bornfreund, Lori Connors-Tadros, Daria Hall, Nancy Shier, Conor Williams,
Brandon Wright, and Margie Yeager. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not
necessarily represent those of the reviewers.
2 Lee, V.E. and Burkam, D.T. (2002). “Inequality at the Starting Gate: Social Background Diferences in Achievement
as Children Begin School.” Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute.http://epsl.asu.edu/epru/articles/EPRU-0603-
138-OWI.pdf.
3 The Baltimore Times. “Maryland Opens Applications for Pre-k Expansion.” (May 5, 2014).http://baltimoretimes-
online.com/news/2014/may/05/maryland-opens-applications-pre-k-expansion/; Maryland State Department of
Education. (2013). “Children Entering School Ready to Learn: The 2012-2013 Maryland School Readiness Report.”http://www.marylandpublicschools.org/NR/rdonlyres/BCFF0F0E-33E5-48DA-8F11-28CF333816C2/35515/MMSR_
ExecutiveSummaryReport20122013_.pdf; Maryland State Department of Education. (March 25, 2014). “Maryland
Kindergarten Readiness Takes Another Step Forward.”http://www.mscca.org/pdfs/MSDE Release -
Maryland%20Kindergarten%20Readiness%20Improves.pdf.
4 Maryland State Department of Education. “Children Entering School Ready to Learn: The 2012-2013 Maryland
School Readiness Report.”
5 Loeb, S. and Bassok, D. (2007). “Early Childhood and the Achievement Gap.” In H.F. Ladd and E.B. Fiske (Eds.),
Handbook of Research in Education Finance and Policy.http://cepa.stanford.edu/content/early-childhood-and-
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6 Hart, B. and Risley, T.R. (1995). “Meaningful Diferences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children.”http://www.lenababy.com/Study.aspx.
7 Ounce of Prevention Fund. (n.d.). “It’s Possible: Closing the Achievement Gap in Academic Performance.” http://
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and Frequently Asked Questions.” High/Scope Educational Research Foundation.http://www.highscope.org/fle/
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9 American Academy of Pediatrics. (2005). “Quality Early Education and Child Care from Birth to Kindergarten.”
Committee on Early Childhood, Adoption, and Dependent Care. Pediatrics, 115(1), 187-191.http://pediatrics.
aappublications.org/content/115/1/187.full#T1; Yoshikawa, H. et al. (2013). “Investing in Our Future: The Evidence
Base on Preschool Education.” Foundation for Child Development.http://fcd-us.org/sites/default/fles/Evidence
Base%20on%20Preschool%20Education%20FINAL.pdf. Fiene, Richard. (2002). “13 Indicators of Quality Child
Care: Research Update.” Washington, DC: Department of Health and Human Services, Ofce of the Assistant
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10 SEDL. (2004). “Readiness: School, Family, and Community Connections.” National Center for Family & Community
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11 Child Trends. (2010). “A Review of School Readiness Practices in the States: Early Learning Guidelines
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12 Isaacs, J.B. and Roessel, E. (2008). “Impacts of Early Childhood Programs.” Brookings Institute.http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2008/09/early-programs-isaacs; Barnett, W.S. (2008).“Preschool
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13 Ounce of Prevention Fund. (n.d.). “Characteristics of Quality Early Learning Environments.”http://www.ounceofprevention.org/news/characteristics-of-quality-early-learning.php.
14 Tout, K., Halle, T., Daily, S., Albertson-Junkans, L., and Moodie, S. (2013). “The Research Base for a Birth to Age 8
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15 Annie E. Casey Foundation. (January 1, 2010). “Early Warning! Why Reading Matters at the End of Third
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16 Annie E. Casey Foundation. “Early Warning! Why Reading Matters at the End of Third Grade”; National Center
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17 Kauerz, K. and Cofman, J. (March 2013). “Framework for Planning, Implementing, and Evaluating PreK-3rd Grade
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19 Regenstein, E. and Romero-Jurado, R. (June 2014). “A Framework for Rethinking State Education Accountability and
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37 Kennel, P. (2013). “Family Engagement at Educare.”http://www.earlysuccess.org/sites/default/fles/website_fles/
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40 Bireda, S. and Moses, J. (2010). “Reducing Student Poverty in the Classroom.” Center for American Progress. http://
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44 Kreider, H. “Getting Parents “Ready” for Kindergarten: The Role of Early Childhood Education.”
45 Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP). “Title I Early Education: Models for Using ARRA Funds.” (n.d.)http://www.clasp.org/documents/Title-I-Models-for-ARRA.pdf.
46 US Department of Education. “School Improvement Grants – Eligibility.” (November 28, 2011).http://www2.ed.gov/programs/sif/eligibility.html.
47 US Department of Education. “School Improvement Grants–American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009;
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49 US Department of Education. (November 1, 2010). “Guidance on Fiscal Year 2010 School Improvement Grants.
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whats-possible-turning-around-americas-lowest-achieving-schools/.
50 O’Brien, E.M. and Dervarics, C.J. (2013). “Which Way Up: What Research Says About School Turnaround Strategies.”
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51 US Department of Education. (November 21, 2013). “School Improvement Grant (SIG) Assessment Results: Cohorts
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52 113th Congress, 1st session. (January 17, 2014). “Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2014.” Public Law No: 113-76.http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-113hr3547enr/pdf/BILLS-113hr3547enr.pdf; Klein, A. (January 28, 2014). “SIG
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53 The White House Ofce of the Press Secretary. (September 23, 2011). “Remarks by the President on No Child
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54 McNeil, M. (April 10, 2014). “Many States Left Key NCLB Flexibility on the Table.” Education Week.http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/04/10/28multiple.h33.html?cmp=ENL-EU-NEWS1; Polikof, M.,
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55 US Department of Education, “ESEA Flexibility.”
56 US Department of Education, “ESEA Flexibility.”
57 US Department of Education, “Turnaround Principles.”
CHANGING THE METRICS OF TURNAROUND TO ENCOURAGE EARLY LEARNING STRATEGIES 30
POLICY CONVERSATIONS
Conversation No. 4 Version 1.0 September 22, 2014
58 US Department of Education. “Guidance on Fiscal Year 2010 School Improvement Grants. Under 1003(g) of the
Elementary and Secondary Education Act”; School Improvement Grants applications can be found from the
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Education athttps://www2.ed.gov/programs/sif/summary/vaapp.pdf.
59 US Department of Education. “Guidance on Fiscal Year 2010 School Improvement Grants. Under 1003(g) of the
Elementary and Secondary Education Act.”; School Improvement Grants applications can be found from the
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Department of Education athttps://www2.ed.gov/programs/sif/summary/wyapp.pdf.
60 Mass Insight Education. (2010). “Metrics for School Turnaround: A Comprehensive Set of Metrics to Measure
School Turnaround Eforts.http://www.massinsight.org/publications/stg-resources/118/fle/1/pubs; Hansen, M.
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61 Regenstein, E. and Romero-Jurado, R. “A Framework for Rethinking State Education Accountability and Support
from Birth through High School.”
62 US Department of Education, “ESEA Flexibility.”
63 University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research. (2013). “Illinois 5Essentials Survey. Organizing
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64 US Department of Education. (2013). “EdFacts Overview.” (2013).http://www2.ed.gov/about/inits/ed/edfacts/
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65 107th Congress, 1st session. “No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.” Public Law No. 107-110.http://www2.ed.gov/
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66 A report by Public Impact focusing on these state-run districts draws lessons learned with regard to takeover
authority and political context, strategy to school operation, central ofce structure, and capacity to carry out
the change efort. See Public Impact. “Extraordinary Authority Districts: Design Considerations – Framework and
Takeaways.” (2014).http://publicimpact.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Extraordinary_Authority_Districts-
Public_Impact.pdf.
67 Klein, A. (July 8, 2014). “School Turnarounds Proving Heavy Lift for Waiver States. Many Still Struggling Despite
NCLB Leeway.” Education Week, Vol. 33, Issue 36.http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/07/09/36waivers.h33.
html.
68 Klein, A. (November 21, 2013). “School Improvement Grant Program Gets Mixed Grades in Ed. Dept. Analysis.”
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daily/fypaper/2012/the-disappointing-but-completely-predictable-results-from-SIG.html.
69 Yoshikawa, H. et al. “Investing in Our Future: The Evidence Base on Preschool Education.”
70 Karoly, L.A., Kilburn, M.R., and Cannon, J.S. (2005). “Early Childhood Interventions: Proven Results, Future Promise.”
RAND Corporation.http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2005/RAND_MG341.pdf.
71 Hart, B. and Risley, T.R. “Meaningful Diferences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children.”
72 Center for Public Education. (2012). “The Principal’s Perspective: Full Report.”http://www.centerforpubliceducation.
org/principal-perspective; Seashore-Louis, K., et al. (2010). “Learning from Leadership: Investigating the Links
from Improved Student Learning.” Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement.http://www.
wallacefoundation.org/knowledge-center/school-leadership/key-research/Documents/Investigating-the-Links-to-
Improved-Student-Learning.pdf.
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73 Seashore-Louis, K. et al. “Learning from Leadership: Investigating the Links from Improved Student Learning.”
74 Loeb, S., Kalogrides, D., and Horng, E. (2010). “Principal Preferences and Uneven Distribution of Principals Across
Schools.” Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Vol. 32, No. 2, 205-229.http://cepa.stanford.edu/sites/default/
fles/Principal_Preferences_EEPA.pdf.
75 Ylimaki, R.M. and Brundermann, L. “Turnaround Leadership Development Project: Preliminary Findings from a
Statewide Project.” University of Arizona, 2012.http://www.coe.arizona.edu/sites/default/fles/Report -
Turnaround%20Leadership%20Project%20%281%29.pdf.
76 Council of the Great City Schools. (2010). “Urban School Superintendents: Characteristics, Tenure, and Salary.”http://www.cgcs.org/cms/lib/DC00001581/Centricity/Domain/4/Supt_Survey2010.pdf.
77 Burkham, D.T., Lee, V.E., and Dwyer, J. (2009). “School Mobility in the Early Elementary Grades.”http://fcd-us.org/
sites/default/fles/BurkamSchoolMobilityInThe%20EarlyElementaryGrades.pdf.
78 O’Donnell, R. and Gazos, A. (2010). “Student Mobility in Massachusetts.” Massachusetts Department of Elementary
& Secondary Education.http://www.doe.mass.edu/infoservices/reports/mobility/0710.doc; Thomas B. Fordham
Institute and Community Research Partners. (November 2012). “Student Nomads: Mobility in Ohio’s Schools.” (http://www.edexcellence.net/sites/default/fles/publication/pdfs/OSMS Full Report 11-8-12_7_0.pdf; US
Government Accountability Ofce (GAO). (November 2010). “Many Challenges Arise in Educating Students Who
Change Schools Frequently.”http://www.gao.gov/assets/320/312480.pdf.
79 Burkham, David T., Lee, Valerie E., & Dwyer, Julie. “School Mobility in the Early Elementary Grades”; US GAO.
“Many Challenges Arise in Educating Students Who Change Schools Frequently”; National Research Council and
Institute of Medicine. (2010). “Student Mobility: Exploring the Impact of Frequent Moves on Achievement: Summary
of a Workshop.” A. Beatty, Rapporteur. Committee on the Impact of Mobility and Change on the Lives of Young
Children, Schools, and Neighborhoods. Board on Children, Youth, and Families, Division of Behavioral and Social
Sciences and Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.http://fcd-us.org/sites/default/fles/
Student%20Mobility%20Workshop.pdf.
80 According to the American Community Survey, in each of the years from 2010 to 2012 more than 75% of people
listing a new residence listed a new residence within the same state. US Census (n.d.). “Geographical Mobility/
Migration. State-to-State Migration Flows.”http://www.census.gov/hhes/migration/data/acs/state-to-state.html.
Student mobility, meanwhile, is defned and tracked diferently across states. For example, in Ohio, the Ohio
Student Mobility Research report analyzed most frequent district to district mobility patterns in the state and also
most common district to charter school mobility. During 2009-2011, 50 districts in the Cincinnati area exchanged
approximately 19,000 students; Cincinnati Public Schools also exchanged students with other major districts in the
state. See Thomas B. Fordham Institute and Community Research Partners. (November 2012). “Student Nomads:
Mobility in Ohio’s Schools”; Thomas B. Fordham Institute and Community Research Partners. (November 2012).
“Ohio Student Mobility Research Project: Cincinnati Area Profle.”http://www.communityresearchpartners.org/wp-
content/uploads/Reports/Mobility-Research/OSMS_CincinnatiAreaProfle.pdf.
81 Studies suggest student mobility has negative impact on a child’s academic achievement and in addition, creates
disruption for teaching and learning in the classroom as a whole. Teachers reported needing to alter their instruction
to support and accommodate the needs of mobile students. See Burkham, D.T., Lee, V.E., and Dwyer, J. “School
Mobility in the Early Elementary Grades”; US GAO. “Many Challenges Arise in Educating Students Who Change
Schools Frequently”; Reynolds, A.J., Chen, C.C. and Herbers, J.E. (2009). “School Mobility and Educational Success:
A Research Synthesis and Evidence on Prevention.” University of Minnesota.http://www.iom.edu/~/media/Files/
Activity%20Files/Children/ChildMobility/Reynolds%20Chen%20and%20Herbers.pdf.
82 Simon, S. (November 27, 2013). “Arne Duncan Schooled in Limits of Power.” Politico.http://www.politico.com/
story/2013/11/arne-duncan-education-secretary-100372.html.
83 III.A above.
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84 For example, the New America Foundation held a panel discussion on these topics January 14, 2013. See videohttp://newamerica.net/events/2013/turnaround_20.
85 The New America panel also recommended incentives for schools to include early learning as a priority, and
incentives for schools to partner with early learning providers in their community. A requirement to set specifc
goals for improving early learning and the early elementary grades would create such an incentive.
86 US Department of Education. “Proposed Requirements–School Improvement Grants–Title I of the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act of 1965.”
87 US Department of Education. “Proposed Requirements–School Improvement Grants–Title I of the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act of 1965.” 53258, 53267.
88 US Department of Education. “Proposed Requirements–School Improvement Grants–Title I of the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act of 1965.” 53267.
89 US Department of Education. “Proposed Requirements–School Improvement Grants–Title I of the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act of 1965.” 53255-53256.
90 It is also the case that the model itself focuses exclusively on schools as deliverers of early learning services, and
not as part of a broader system of early learning providers. In many communities schools themselves are not the
primary providers of early learning services, as discussed in IV.B.2 and IV.C.2. The Department’s proposed model
does not encourage districts and schools to defne kindergarten readiness, identify the sources of their incoming
kindergarteners, or partner with early learning providers to develop a true educational continuum.
91 In 2012, 25 states required assessments during the kindergarten year and of these states, 12 reported collecting
assessments at kindergarten entry, 10 during the school year, and 3 at both entry and during the year. Further,
in 2013, 34 states described plans for a kindergarten entry assessment. Currently, many states are in diferent
stages of implementing kindergarten entry assessment policies. For instance, as of January 2014, some states
are in the exploration stage (ex. AZ, AR, and NY), installation stage of conducting pilot assessments (ex. DC, DE,
NJ), or the initial or full implementation stage (ex. CO, CA, MD, VT, WV). See Center on Enhancing Early Learning
Outcomes. (February 2014). “Fast Fact: Information and Resources on Developing State Policy on Kindergarten
Entry Assessment.”http://ceelo.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/KEA_Fast_Fact_Feb_11_2014_2.pdf; Schilder, D.
and Carolan, M. (March 2014). “State of the State Policy Snapshot: State Early Childhood Assessment Outcomes.”
Center on Enhancing Early Learning Outcomes.http://ceelo.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/CEELO_policy_
snapshot_child_assessment_march_2014.pdf.
92 Snow, K. (2011). “Developing Kindergarten Readiness and Other Large-Scale Assessment Systems: Necessary
Considerations in the Assessment of Young Children.” Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of
Young Children.http://www.naeyc.org/fles/naeyc/fle/research/Assessment_Systems.pdf; Center on Enhancing
Early Learning Outcomes. “Fast Fact: Information and Resources on Developing State Policy on Kindergarten Entry
Assessment.”
93 Center on Enhancing Early Learning Outcomes. “Fast Fact: Information and Resources on Developing State Policy
on Kindergarten Entry Assessment.”
94 Shepard, L., Kagan, S.L., Wertz, E. (Eds.). (1998). “Principles and Recommendations for Early Childhood
Assessments.” The National Education Goals Panel.http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/negp/reports/prinrec.pdf;
National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) and National Association of Early Childhood
Specialists in State Departments of Education (NAECS/SDE). (2003). “Early Childhood Curriculum, Assessment, and
Program Evaluation. Building an Efective, Accountable System in Programs for Children Birth through Age 8.” A
Joint Position Statement of NAEYC and NAECS/SDE.https://www.naeyc.org/fles/naeyc/fle/positions/pscape.pdf;
National Early Childhood Accountability Task Force. (2007). “Taking Stock: Assessing and Improving Early Childhood
Learning and Program Quality.”http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2007/10/31/taking-
stock-assessing-and-improving-early-childhood-learning-and-program-quality; Snow, Kyle. (2011). “Developing
Kindergarten Readiness and Other Large-Scale Assessment Systems: Necessary Considerations in the Assessment
of Young Children.”
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95 Barnett, W.S., Carolan, M., Squires, J.H., and Browne, K.C. (2013). “The State of Preschool 2013: State Preschool
Yearbook. National Institute for Early Education Research.http://nieer.org/publications/state-preschool-2013.
In addition to signifcant diferences across states in overall program funding levels, there are two other major
factors that contribute to the variation in the percentage of children served by school districts: (1) the fact that in
many states a meaningful percentage of preschool service is provided through community providers, and (2) the
variation in service levels for diferent communities within each state.
96 Council of Chief State School Ofcers. (2013). “School Choice in the States: A Policy Landscape.”http://www.
ccsso.org/Resources/Publications/School_Choice_in_the_States_A_Policy_Landscape.html; Education Commission
of the States (ECS). (2013). “ECS State Policy Database Choice of Schools.”http://www.ecs.org/ecs/ecscat.nsf/
WebTopicView?OpenView&count=-1&RestrictToCategory=Choice+of+Schools--Choice/Open+Enrollment.
97 Regenstein, E. and Romero-Jurado, R. “A Framework for Rethinking State Education Accountability and Support
from Birth through High School.”
98 Sebring, P., Allensworth, E., Bryk, A., Easton, J., and Luppescu, S. “The Essential Supports for School Improvement”;
Regenstein, E. and Romero-Jurado, R. “A Framework for Rethinking State Education Accountability and Support
from Birth through High School,” 5.
99 Regenstein, E. and Romero-Jurado, R. “A Framework for Rethinking State Education Accountability and Support
from Birth through High School”; Corbett, J. (2011). “Lead Turnaround Partners.” Center on Innovation &
Improvement.http://www.adi.org/about/downloads/LeadPartners.pdf; Kutash, J., Nico, E., Gorin, E., Rahmatullah,
S., and Tallant, K. (2010). “The School Turnaround Field Guide.” Wallace Foundation.http://www.wallacefoundation.org/pages/turnaround-actors-school-turnaround-feld-guide.aspx.
100 US Department of Education. (August 5, 2013). “California Ofce to Reform Education. Local Agencies’ Request for
Waivers Under Section 9401 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965,” 94-95.http://coredistricts.
org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/2.-CORE-waiver-application-May-1-2014-Amendments-redline-vfnal.pdf; Ehrlich,
Stacy B., et al. (May 2014). “Preschool Attendance in Chicago Public Schools: Relationships with Learning Outcomes
and Reasons for Absences.” University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research.http://ccsr.uchicago.
edu/sites/default/fles/publications/Pre-K%20Attendance%20Report.pdf.
101 US Department of Education. (August 5, 2013). “California Ofce to Reform Education. Local Agencies’ Request for
Waivers Under Section 9401 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965.”
102 Regenstein, E. and Romero-Jurado, R. “A Framework for Rethinking State Education Accountability and Support
from Birth through High School,” 27.
103 Meisels, S. (2006). “Accountability in Early Childhood: No Easy Answers.” Herr Research Center for Children and
Social Policy, Erikson Institute.http://www.isbe.state.il.us/earlychi/pdf/meisels_accountability.pdf; Shepard, L.,
Kagan, L., and Wurtz, E. (1998). “Principles and Recommendations for Early Childhood Assessments.” Goal 1 Early
Childhood Assessments Resource Group, National Education Goals Panel.http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/negp/
reports/prinrec.pdf.
104 Dunn, L.M. & Dunn, D.M. (2007). Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test – IV. Circle Pines, MN: American
Guidance Service.
105 Woodcock, R. W., McGrew, K. S., & Mather, N. (2001). Woodcock-Johnson III. Itasca, IL: Riverside Publishing.
106 Wat, A. and Gayl, C. (July 2009). “Beyond the School Yard: Pre-K Collaborations with Community-Based
Partners.” Pre-K Now, The Pew Center on the States.http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/
reports/0001/01/01/beyond-the-school-yard; Schumacher, R., Ewen, D., and Hart, K. (2005). “All Together Now:
State Experiences in Using Community-Based Child Care to Provide Kindergarten.” Center for Law and Social Policy,
Policy Brief, No. 5.http://fles.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED491133.pdf.
107 Kauerz, K. (July 9, 2012). “Pre-K-3rd: A Comprehensive Reform Strategy.” University of Washington.http://fcd-us.
org/sites/default/fles/kauerz_slides.pdf.
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108 Jolly, Y. and Orbach, S. (n.d.). “Smoothing the Transition to Kindergarten: Toward a Coordinated State Policy.” http://
www.hks.harvard.edu/var/ezp_site/storage/fckeditor/fle/pdfs/degree-programs/oca/pae-jolly-orbach-transition-
to-kindergarten.pdf; National Center for Family and Community Connections with Schools. (October 2005).
“Easing the Transition from Pre-K to Kindergarten: What Schools and Families Can Do to Address Child Readiness.”
Southwest Educational Development Laboratory.http://www.sedl.org/connections/resources/rb/rb6-readiness.
pdf; Bohan-Baker, M. and Little, P.M.D. (April 2002). “The Transition to Kindergarten: A Review of Current Research
and Promising Practices to Involve Families.”http://www.hfrp.org/content/download/1165/48670/fle/bohan.pdf.
109 Kauerz, K. “Pre-K-3rd: A Comprehensive Reform Strategy”; Jolly, Y. and Orbach, S. “Smoothing the Transition to
Kindergarten: Toward a Coordinated State Policy”; Kagan, S.L., Caroll, J., Comer, J.P., and Scott-Little, C. (September
2006). “Alignment: A Missing Link in Early Childhood Transitions.” Young Children, Vol. 61, No. 5, 26-32.http://eric.
ed.gov/?id=EJ751406.
110 Educare Learning Network. “Educare Learning Network Research Agenda.”
111 Bohan-Baker, M. and Little, P.M.D. “The Transition to Kindergarten: A Review of Current Research and Promising
Practices to Involve Families.”
112 Bohan-Baker, M. and Little, P.M.D. “The Transition to Kindergarten: A Review of Current Research and Promising
Practices to Involve Families.”
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Learn more about our initiatives,
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doc_365612114.pdf
This document about changing the metrics of turnaround to encourage early learning strategies.
CHANGING THE METRICS OF TURNAROUND TO ENCOURAGE EARLY LEARNING STRATEGIES
POLICY CONVERSATIONS
Conversation No. 4 Version 1.0 September 22, 2014
Elliot Regenstein, Ounce of Prevention Fund
Rio Romero-Jurado, Ounce of Prevention Fund
Justin Cohen, Mass Insight Education
Alison Segal
1
, Mass Insight Education
CHANGING THE METRICS OF
TURNAROUND TO ENCOURAGE
EARLY LEARNING STRATEGIES
CHANGING THE METRICS OF TURNAROUND TO ENCOURAGE EARLY LEARNING STRATEGIES 2
POLICY CONVERSATIONS
Conversation No. 4 Version 1.0 September 22, 2014
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Since the release of The Turnaround Challenge in 2007, the federal government and states have invested
considerable time and money trying to improve the nation’s lowest-performing schools. In many of the
lowest-performing elementary schools, one major problem is that children are entering kindergarten
already behind. Yet the metrics used to evaluate turnaround success all but guarantee that turnarounds
will focus resources on later years. Changing the Metrics of Turnaround to Encourage Early Learning Strategies
argues that the federal government and states should rethink their metrics for turnaround success in
order to encourage earlier investment.
The achievement gap starts early—indeed, it can be measured even in the frst year of life. High-quality
early learning can make a signifcant diference in a child’s ability to learn, particularly if it starts before
a child turns 3. Moreover, successful early learning programs can build community and family ties that
beneft children throughout their school careers.
Current turnaround funding supports diferent school-level strategies, but the primary metric of
success—improved test scores—is the same across all available strategies. In elementary schools,
English language arts and math test scores in 3rd grade and up are generally the key determinant of a
turnaround’s success. As long as these metrics are used, however, turnaround leaders will have a major
disincentive to invest in early learning. Even if the period for measuring turnaround success is expanded
from three years to fve, waiting until 3rd grade to measure turnaround success discourages investment
in early learning. If a school launched preschool for 4-year-olds in the frst year of a turnaround, the frst
cohort couldn’t even start impacting the school’s key metrics until year fve of the turnaround. Simply
put, that time lag between investment and payof is too long for most turnaround leaders to bear,
particularly given the sense of urgency for immediate results that turnarounds are designed to bring.
To change this dynamic requires changing the metrics of turnaround success and adopting metrics
that can be used prior to 3rd grade. Shifting the focus of measurement from standardized test scores
to professional practice allows the success of turnaround to be measured starting in kindergarten or
earlier. This in turn allows schools to reap the beneft of early learning investment almost immediately.
Those professional practice metrics should be used in combination with child outcome metrics—but the
range of available child outcome metrics should be expanded beyond standardized test scores, which
leading researchers have said should not be used for program accountability with children younger
than 3rd grade.
The goal of turnaround funding is to put schools on a trajectory to long-term success, but the metrics
used to measure short-term success in turnarounds efectively eliminate the viability of a potentially
important long-term improvement strategy. Accountability metrics that address early learning and
the K–2 years will not only give turnaround schools a much more precise understanding of what is
occurring before 3rd grade, they will encourage schools to address any challenges immediately. While
early learning may not be the right solution in every turnaround elementary school, changing the metrics
of turnaround to make it a viable option would have benefcial short- and long-term impacts in some of
the nation’s lowest-performing schools.
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I. INTRODUCTION
School turnaround is meant to provide a rapid change in trajectory for the lowest-performing schools.
*
Turnaround schools
†
have had low achievement or signifcant achievement gaps, so they are given
additional resources to make dramatic changes—typically focused on improving the quality of instruction
and professional practice. But in many turnaround schools, a major challenge is that children entering
kindergarten are already months or years behind. For these schools, eforts to improve professional
practice will not change the fact that the school is in perpetual catch-up mode. To address that issue,
they need to start much earlier with high-quality early learning.
‡
Early learning can improve children’s
kindergarten readiness and set the stage for longer-term success.
To date, early learning has not been a major strategy for turnaround schools, in large part because of
the metrics of success used to evaluate the turnaround. Currently, the primary metric of success for
turnaround schools is generally the improvement shown in scores on accountability tests administered
in 3rd grade and up. Those test scores are expected to show signifcant improvement within the frst two
to three years of the turnaround. As long as that is the primary metric of success, however, turnaround
leaders will have a major incentive to not focus resources on early learning. The children served by early
learning in the frst year of a turnaround will not take accountability tests until at least the ffth year of the
turnaround, and by then the turnaround’s success or failure will have already been determined. As long
as that remains the case, turnaround leaders will have a strong incentive to focus resources on serving
children who will take accountability tests in the frst two or three years of the turnaround— even if the
long-term best interests of the school would be better served by greater investment in early learning.
What’s needed to change that dynamic is an entirely new way of measuring success in school turnaround.
The new metrics of success should include two kinds of metrics:
• Metrics that address professional practice, including the quality of instruction and leadership
• Child outcome metrics other than scores on accountability tests
Unlike high-stakes accountability tests, these metrics are suitable for use in kindergarten through grade 2.
If these metrics are used, then schools that use turnaround resources to support early learning can
actually see that early learning investment impacts the determination of the turnaround’s success. New
spending on early learning will not always be the greatest need at turnaround schools, and in many
* Mass Insight defnes school turnaround as a “dramatic and comprehensive intervention in a low-performing school that 1) produces
signifcant gains in achievement within two years; and 2) readies the school for the longer process of transformation into a high-per-
formance organization.” Calkins, A.;, Guenther, W.; Belfore, G.; and Lash, D. (2007). The Turnaround Challenge: Why America’s best
opportunity to dramatically improve student achievement lies in our worst-performing schools. Boston, MA: Mass Insight.
† “Turnaround schools” are schools that have been identifed by the state for a “school turnaround” process based on low perfor-
mance or signifcant achievement gaps. This includes, but is not limited to, schools that are identifed for school turnaround based
on federal requirements as discussed below. In this paper the term “turnaround schools” refers exclusively to elementary or kinder-
garten to 2nd grade (K–2) schools.
‡ The term “early learning” means school-based or center-based programs for children from birth through kindergarten entry that
provide standards-based education, which includes, but is not limited to, Head Start and state-funded preschool programs.
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turnaround schools better data is needed to help them determine whether early learning is the best use
of resources. But at some turnaround schools early learning will be a smart long-term investment, and
turnaround metrics should not discourage those schools from making that investment.
This paper frst examines how low-performing schools can greatly beneft from high-quality early
learning. It then argues that the next generation of turnaround metrics must include a diferent mix of
short- and long-term metrics that create the right incentives for early learning, including metrics that
address performance prior to 3rd grade accountability testing. The paper argues that when the federal
government and states fund turnaround eforts, they should ensure that the metrics they use to judge
their success do not discourage schools from using early learning as a long-term improvement strategy.
II. WHY EARLY LEARNING IS CRITICAL IN THE TURNAROUND CONTEXT
Turnaround schools are by defnition low-performing schools. In turnaround elementary schools,
children are often entering kindergarten already behind, meaning that high-quality early learning should
be an essential part of any long-term systemic solution. High-quality early learning has long-term impacts
on student achievement, can help strengthen parent and community engagement, and addresses a
signifcant issue that to date no other turnaround strategy has tackled: the gaps turnaround schools aim
to address emerge well before kindergarten entry.
A. The Achievement Gap Opens Before Kindergarten
Turnaround schools are starting out behind and playing catch-up from the frst day children walk into
kindergarten. Before entering kindergarten, the average cognitive scores of afuent preschool-aged
children are 60% above children in the lowest-income bracket.
2
Maryland is one of the states that has
been systematic about collecting school readiness data, and its data refects this disparity. Maryland
has made signifcant strides in the overall readiness of children entering kindergarten by expanding
access to half- and full-day public pre-kindergarten for families at or below 300% of poverty, investing
in innovative initiatives serving children birth to age 5, and making comprehensive improvements in
curricula, assessments, and accountability systems through the state’s Race to the Top-Early Learning
Challenge grant.
3
Still, at-risk groups—including English language learners and low-income children—
continue to lag behind their peers.
4
Other studies further indicate that the achievement gap surfaces during the earliest years and changes
relatively little after elementary school.
5
Children’s academic successes at ages 9 and 10 are set up
by the amount of talk they hear from birth to age 3. Findings from a groundbreaking study showed
that children from poor households enter kindergarten with a listening vocabulary of 3,000 words vs.
20,000 words from children in middle-income households.
6
The early achievement gap between low-
income children and their wealthier counterparts also has impact beyond the school age years into
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high school.
7
These fndings signify how pivotal early experiences can be especially for disadvantaged
children but also, importantly, how the learning gap manifests even prior to formal schooling.
B. The Impact of High-Quality Education in the Birth to 8 Years
1. Early Learning
In response to research showing the extent of the learning gap evident prior to kindergarten, there
have been increased eforts to provide high-quality early learning to help close the gap. Studies on
the impact of high-quality early learning programs have continued to demonstrate a wide range of
benefts for children and families, especially those living in poverty.
8
Key hallmarks of high-quality
early learning programs include ensuring strong program leadership, evidence-based practice and
integrated curriculum across child developmental domains, low staf-child ratio and small class sizes,
strong engagement with families, high staf qualifcations and intensive professional development,
and a safe and healthy child-friendly classroom environment.
9
These types of robust early learning
programs have been shown to produce positive efects on children’s cognitive skills, behavior, and
social and emotional outcomes.
10
A growing number of studies on early learning impacts have also
found efects on children’s readiness to learn, which lays the foundation for successful transition into
kindergarten.
11
Longitudinal fndings from model early childhood programs further point to long-term academic and
social benefts consisting of higher educational attainment and increased earnings, improved health,
more positive family relationships, and reductions in remedial education, crime, and receipt of public
assistance.
12
The strong gains produced from high-quality early learning thus signals its signifcance
in the education continuum and the valuable role it can have in developing strategies around school
turnaround.
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HIGH-QUALITY EARLY LEARNING THAT IS SAFE, HEALTHY, STIMULATING,
AND ORGANIZED, HELPS CHILDREN ENTER SCHOOL READY AND PROVIDES
THE FOUNDATION FOR SUCCESS IN SCHOOL AND LIFE. THE FOLLOWING ARE
SOME KEY FEATURES OF A QUALITY EARLY CHILDHOOD PROGRAM:
13
Educated, attentive, and engaged teachers and staf
• Teachers with four-year degrees and specifc training in early childhood education
• Teachers who crouch to eye-level to speak to children, and who hold, cuddle, show
afection,
and speak directly to infants and toddlers
• Families and teachers exchanging information about the child’s development
and learning progress
A safe, healthy, and child-friendly environment
• A room well-equipped with sufcient materials and toys
• Classrooms in which materials and activities are placed at eye level for the children
• Materials and toys accessible to children in an orderly display
• Centers that encourage safe, outdoor playtime
• Frequent hand-washing by children and adults
• Visitors welcomed with appropriate parental consent
Stimulating activities and appropriately structured routines
• Children who are engaged in their activities
• Children ofered breakfast and lunch and a time to nap
• Children participating with teachers and each other in individual, small-group,
and large-group activities
• Children receiving a variety of stimuli in their daily routine using indoor and outdoor
spaces and age-appropriate language, literacy, math, science, art, music, movement,
and dramatic play experiences
• Preschoolers who are allowed to play independently
To create this environment requires limiting class sizes and teacher-to-child ratios, generally
with no more than eight infants and toddlers and no more than 20 preschoolers in a classroom
as well as a teacher-to-child ratio of 1:3 for infants and 1:10 for preschoolers.
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2. Creating a Continuum with the Early Elementary Years
It is clear there is growing recognition that the early years up to age 8 (a child’s typical age by
3rd grade) are critical to children’s educational development and achievement, as children are
acquiring the foundational skills essential to their future success.
14
To sustain benefts attained
from quality early childhood experiences, gains made must be reinforced in the early elementary
grades. Research evidence indicates that reading profciency in the 3rd grade is a strong predictor
of high school graduation and career outcomes.
15
Over ¾ of children in poverty are at increased
risk of not graduating on time because they are not reading profciently by the end of 3rd grade.
16
A comprehensive learning continuum that builds on quality early childhood experiences and
connects birth through 3rd grade provides another opportunity to reduce the achievement gap
while connecting systems to nurture children’s learning and development.
17
Initiatives to align
early learning to 3rd grade focus on improving coordination across the learning continuum in
areas such as standards, curricula, assessment, instruction, teacher preparation, professional
development, and engagement among schools and early childhood community providers and
families.
18
A challenge in the early elementary grades is that there is in efect no real accountability for kinder-
garten through grade 2.
19
Research has shown that compared to teachers in the upper elementary
grades, K–2 teachers may have lower teacher quality measures with regard to credentials that
include years of experience, higher licensure scores, and National Board Certifcation. In fact, in
the schools with the most disadvantaged students, accountability pressures that give incentive
to assign stronger teachers to the upper grades are driving that distribution of teachers.
20
An
accountability system that focused more on professional practice and less on student test scores
would make it less likely that weak teachers would be reassigned to the early elementary grades.
At this time, however, no state has implemented such a system.
C. Early Learning As the Bedrock of Parent and Community Engagement
Turnaround schools are far less likely to succeed if their turnaround strategies focus solely on
“in-school” changes, and far more likely to succeed if they engage parents and the community.
High-quality early learning can help provide a strong foundation for long-term parental and
community engagement. Accordingly, early learning is a potentially critical piece of creating the
kind of parent and community buy-in needed for a school turnaround to succeed in the long term.
1. Parent and Community Engagement is Critical to School Turnaround
Engaging parents and communities is a critical part of school success.
21
A robust support system
that involves engaged families has meaningful impact on children’s cognitive, social, and emotional
development and learning success—and can be especially important for disadvantaged children.
22
A growing body of research has found that strong social support fosters student motivation in
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school, encourages confdence, and increases the likelihood of academic achievement and successful
post-secondary transition.
23
Students who attend turnaround schools are largely low-income
24
and
experience a range of obstacles that make positive relationships with parents and other adults
paramount to their success in education and life.
25
Students with high needs perform better in
school when their families become involved in school activities, further supporting the value of
family engagement in schools as a means for enhancing the academic achievement of low-income
students.
26
This is a key element of “readiness to learn” on the Mass Insight Readiness Triangle (seen
on page 9), which recognizes that turnaround schools must be sensitive to the context students face
outside of school.
27
As turnaround schools and schools with similar challenges interact with students’ environments, they
must continue to foster relationships with key adult fgures—including parents and families—as well
as extend their reach into students’ broader community settings. The community school model is
becoming more prevalent in school improvement. Community schools leverage the school’s physical
space to provide nontraditional supports to students and families within its setting, including health
care, parent education, social services, and community engagement activities.
28
Partnering with
community resources and using the school to build stronger connections among students, families,
and community members supports the students’ development and readiness to learn. Additionally it
bolsters the school environment and its network of community relationships.
29
On the macro level, creating stronger ties and communication channels with communities has far-
reaching implications for poor-performing schools that can pave the path for school improvement.
Recent initiatives by states and school districts to incorporate family and community engagement in
school improvement show that strategies that prioritize engagement eforts and create opportunities
for parents and community members to genuinely participate in schools and decision-making
processes can make a diference in building community-school connections.
30
Schools that have
connected with local community groups to generate increased engagement, for instance, have
experienced enriched school-community networks, school climate, teacher-parent ties, teacher
instruction and professional capacity, and increased student academic achievement.
31
Additionally,
research fndings indicate that school-community collaborations have helped to shape education
policy decisions and innovations that have boosted school and district-level resources and capacity.
32
While substantial evidence points to the important benefts of involved families and community
partners in schools, schools serving largely underserved minority populations have generally struggled
in this arena.
33
Regardless of the challenges that exist, a strong network of family and community
support and resources throughout the educational pipeline plays a signifcant role in the success of
each and every student, especially those whose development is infuenced by the efects of poverty.
34
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2. Early Learning Can Provide a Foundation for Long-Term
Parent and Community Engagement
High-quality early learning is designed to build partnerships
to ensure that responsibility for a child’s education is shared
among the teacher and school, the family, and the community.
Head Start, for example, funds dedicated family and community
engagement initiatives focused on mobilizing school staf,
parents, and community leaders together to promote children’s
healthy development and learning.
35
The federal Race to the
Top-Early Learning Challenge has pushed states to include
family engagement practices in the development of early
learning systems.
36
High-quality early childhood programs such
as Educare Schools have also incorporated intensive family
engagement as part of their comprehensive model. These
programs provide tailored support for individual families and promote practices that help to foster
the parent-child relationship along with the parent’s role as an efective advocate on behalf of their
child’s development and education.
37
Programs have also sought to utilize new parent and community
engagement models in the transition to kindergarten.
38
Early learning systems also seek to connect educational services with health and human services
providers, which can help strengthen community ties. Developing relationships and alliances with
community partners and social service providers can help to address health and human service needs
that have signifcant impact on young students’ daily functioning in and out of the classroom.
39
These
varying needs range from access to adequate meals to health care check-ups and immunizations to
safe and secure housing, which individually as well as collectively, play a role in advancing student
learning and success in school and later life.
40
Studies indicate that in these connections in the early childhood years, families feel welcomed to the
schooling enterprise, but this sense changes in elementary school when school contact becomes more
formalized.
41
Thoughtful integration of early learning in school turnaround eforts thus provides an
opportunity to bridge gaps in family and community engagement at the on-set and builds upon the
efort to have parents, families, and communities as genuine partners throughout a child’s education.
These partnerships lay the groundwork for a child’s learning trajectory and a school’s long-term
success by helping families prepare to connect with their child’s elementary school and providing
schools with early opportunities to form collaborative relationships with the young children and
families they serve. Further, during times of transition, links between school and home are especially
important to a child’s learning experiences. Families and communities are thus key to helping
ensure a smooth transition from early childhood into kindergarten and the elementary years
42
and
promoting a child’s school readiness, which is strongly associated with 3rd grade test scores and later
readiness to
ACT
readiness to
LEARN
readiness to
TEACH
In The Turnaround Challenge, Mass Insight
Education identifed three key dynamics for
how high-performing, high-poverty schools
attain high student achievement.
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achievement.
43
Involvement in such early transitions can shape future school engagement as families
and communities participate in processes that foster confdence, skill, knowledge, and connection
that can be essential to engagement in education.
44
III. CURRENT TURNAROUND FUNDING AND ACCOUNTABILITY
Federal investments to support school improvement eforts have largely focused on turning around the
lowest-performing schools quickly enough to show measurable improvement within three years, with
“success” measured by indicators chosen by the state. Generally states have chosen student achievement
scores on required accountability tests (which begin in 3rd grade) as a primary metric—which is to be
expected, given that those accountability tests are a key success metric for all schools. But by focusing
the metrics of success on 3rd grade and later, these turnaround metrics present a signifcant disincentive
to investment in early learning. This section examines the resources available to turnaround schools,
describes the approaches currently used in states, and then explains how those approaches discourage
the use of early learning in school turnaround.
A. Federal Resources for Turnaround Schools
The US Department of Education allocates a great deal of funding for incentive-based grants to turn
around persistently low-performing schools, such as Title I, the American Recovery and Reinvestment
Act (ARRA), Race to the Top, and School Improvement Grants (SIG). Other than Title I, districts usually
become eligible for such grants based on the performance of individual schools, which are identifed
based on testing in 3rd grade and beyond. These funding streams can be used for early learning,
although they generally are not.
45
Upon receiving any of these grants, schools across the country
are given various timeframes to show improvement—and they tend to focus most resources on the
grades immediately refected in those standardized tests to gain quick wins and demonstrate positive
impacts from the increased funding.
School Improvement Grants
SIG is perhaps the most widely known incentive fund within the Department of Education. The
grant—announced in winter 2009 as a $3.5 billion budget appropriation—requires state education
agencies (SEAs) to identify the bottom 5% of all Title I schools. The Department of Education awards
SIG funding to SEAs based on a formula that allocates SIG money in proportion to funds already
received by the SEA under Parts A, C, and D of Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act
(ESEA). The SEAs are then responsible for allocating the dollars through a formula (e.g., dividing the
lump sum by the number of schools in the upcoming school improvement cohort) or competitive
process (using proposals based of an SEA-issued RFP and awarding grants based on quality of plan
and need) to local education agencies and schools.
46
SEAs are required to allocate at least 95% of
the SIG funding they receive from the Department of Education to districts, and can use the rest for
discretionary spending in Title I schools or districts. To be eligible for the SIG 1003(g) funding, schools
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must be identifed as persistently low-achieving and have had to implement one of four turnaround
models: transformation, turnaround, closure, or restart.
47
On September 8, 2014, the Department of
Education proposed to add new models, including a whole-school model and a model focused on
implementing preschool and full-day kindergarten.
48
THE FOUR TURNAROUND MODELS
TURNAROUND MODEL: Replace the principal and rehire no more than 50% of the staf,
and grant the principal sufcient operational fexibility (including in stafng, calendars/
time and budgeting) to fully implement a comprehensive approach to substantially
improve student outcomes.
RESTART MODEL: Convert a school or close and reopen it under a charter school
operator, a charter management organization, or an education management
organization that has been selected through a rigorous review process.
SCHOOL CLOSURE: Close a school and enroll the students who attended that school
in other schools in the district that are higher achieving.
TRANSFORMATION MODEL: Implement each of the following strategies: (1) replace the
principal and take steps to increase teacher and school leader efectiveness; (2) institute
comprehensive instructional reforms; (3) increase learning time and create community-
oriented schools; and (4) provide operational fexibility and sustained support.
49
Current research does not point to any one model as being more efective than the others,
50
although
early data suggests that the more dramatic interventions—namely restart and turnaround—lead to
more rapid student achievement growth.
51
Data shows that the transformation model is the most
often applied of the four turnaround options. Researchers and practitioners agree it is the least
controversial and least bold of the four models.
SIG grants typically run for three years, although the new proposed regulations would allow them
to run for fve years. For many schools, the 2012-2013 school year marked the end of the three-year
cycle. In some states, schools’ SIG grants may be rescinded before the three-year cycle is completed
facing a lack of proof of improvement, or principals may be removed and replaced when data does
not show progress toward predetermined gains.
More recently, Congress folded in language to the fscal year 2014 budget that make signifcant
changes to the SIG by paving the way for more state and district fexibility. Under the measure, states
can develop their own intervention plans for school improvement and submit them to Department
of Education for approval. Further, states would have the option to implement the “whole school
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reform” model, which would allow schools to partner with organizations on interventions that
show moderate evidence of success. States can also ofer more implementation fexibility for rural
schools. Additionally, the new language stretches the grants for states from three to fve years.
52
The
Department’s September 2014 proposed rules would further codify these changes.
ESEA Waivers and Flexibility
In fall of 2011, President Obama’s administration announced that it would grant waivers to states for
fexibility under the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act’s (NCLB) expectations.
53
The waiver process allows
states to redefne their accountability systems to include a combination of profciency and measures
of student learning growth as well as expand accountability to other subjects beyond math and
English; it also allowed states to add more indicators beyond test scores, although most did not.
54
To
receive fexibility from the NCLB provisions, states must commit to implementing college-and-career-
ready standards and assessments, using diferentiated accountability, increasing support for efective
instruction and leadership (including new evaluation systems), and working to reduce unnecessary
burdens on SEAs and their schools. States are granted new fexibilities, including potential changes to
how they identify and support their lowest-performing schools.
Through waiver accountability, states are required to designate low-performing schools as “priority
schools” and “focus schools” whose performance needs improving, and must also recognize high-
performing or progressing “reward schools.”
55
A priority school is defned as a school meeting at
least one of the following characteristics: It is among the lowest 5% of Title I schools within the
state according to both achievement and “all student groups” progress data; it is a Title I-eligible
or Title I-participating high school with a recurring graduation rate of less than 60%; or it is a Tier I
or Tier II SIG school currently receiving SIG funding. The defning characteristics of a focus school
are centered on achievement gaps, or subgroup performance. Focus schools either have the state’s
largest achievement gaps between the highest- and lowest-achieving subgroups within the school (or
graduation rates for high schools), or have any particular subgroup with especially low achievement
or graduation rates.
Once those schools are identifed, schools or state agencies are given the option to use one of the
four turnaround models to make improvements—or they can design their own interventions and
implement strategies and supports that meet the needs of priority and focus schools.
56
The US
Department of Education requires the use of seven “Turnaround Principles,” which include actions
such as placing an efective principal in the building and redesigning the school day to include time
in the day for teachers and administrators to collaborate around use of data.
57
The principles include
structural, leadership, and cultural changes that the state must ensure the schools implement as
turnaround interventions. These school improvement eforts must be meaningful and aim to enhance
student learning and close achievement gaps across student groups.
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B. Current State Approaches to Turnaround Accountability
1. Measuring Performance
Within the federal framework for school turnaround, states are given discretion to set the metrics
for what constitutes turnaround success. In some states, the metrics are standardized across the
state, and local turnaround leaders must craft school improvement plans aligned to these metrics;
Connecticut, New Jersey, and Virginia are examples of states that use this approach.
58
By contrast,
in some states local turnaround leaders propose metrics that the state then considers for approval;
Pennsylvania and Wyoming are two examples of states using this approach.
59
Under either of these two approaches, the metrics of turnaround success have heavily emphasized
standardized assessment scores in their metrics for turnaround success—consistent with their
overall approach to accountability.
60
State accountability systems are primarily driven by school
performance on standardized tests, which are administered starting in 3rd grade.
61
Because it is
those accountability systems that initially identify schools for turnaround, it is only logical that those
same accountability systems would also be used as a gauge of turnaround success. Moreover, in
the waivers the Department of Education required criteria for exiting “priority and “focus” status
that demonstrate an improvement in both graduation rates and test scores for all students and
subgroups—specifcally, meeting annual measurable objectives (AMOs) in reading and mathematics
profciency rates.
62
The overall success of a turnaround is measured primarily in terms of a state accountability system,
but additional metrics are frequently used to gauge performance in a more comprehensive manner.
Whether the state is determining the metrics itself or approving local proposals, the metrics generally
include indicators refecting school environment and student performance, capturing both qualitative
and quantitate measures. Some states also include a focus on qualitative metrics, identifying positive
changes in school climate and culture as a major step forward in turnaround. The 5Essentials Survey
developed for Illinois by the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research has been
used to identify changes in leadership styles, family involvement, and general school environment.
63
While the federal government gives states fexibility in which indicators it uses to measure turnaround
success, the Department of Education does require the collection of certain key indicators. Beyond
descriptive data required of all schools, schools receiving School Improvement Grants also collect 14
general indicators that include average scale scores on subject tests, student and teacher attendance
rates, minutes in the school year, and teacher evaluation information.
64
States may also choose to
collect data beyond what the Department of Education asks for; some states provide a list of indicators
to schools and districts, and allow them to choose the metrics most pertinent to their growth. For
example, a school struggling with high rates of disciplinary infractions (e.g., suspensions, expulsions)
may want to specifcally track ofce visits and classroom culture data.
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The School Improvement Grant, which most states’ turnaround schools receive, utilizes metrics
that focus on indicators that are both leading and lagging indicators. Leading indicators are metrics
that typically predict the outcome and show up quickly, such as the number of minutes in a school
day, student dropout rate, student attendance rate, and the number of students participating on
state assessments. Lagging indicators are metrics that take longer to show up, including student
achievement on state assessments, college enrollment rates, and graduation rates. These indicators
have been used in diferent combinations to identify schools for turnaround, measure the progress
of turnarounds, and determine whether schools can exit turnaround status (with assessment scores
and graduation rates the primary drivers, as noted).
Over the course of turnaround, SEAs track school progress in diferent ways. For example, Virginia uses
the Indistar system to track school progress and fdelity of implementation—essentially, whether the
schools are doing what they said they would. Virginia also assigns state staf as liaisons to individual
schools or districts to serve as a direct line to the State Turnaround Ofce; similar systems are used
in other states, like Florida and New Jersey. Rhode Island takes performance monitoring a step
further, using the small size of the state to its advantage to host biweekly meetings with principals
and superintendents from low-performing schools. At these meetings, the Rhode Island Department
of Education presents the district and school leaders with data specifc to their schools, and facilitates
a discussion about what the data means, and what might need to change to improve future results. In
some other states, this type of deep review of the data may take place annually to evaluate whether
the school is on a trajectory to meet its performance targets.
2. Taking Action Based on Results
Federal law authorizes states to take action if turnaround schools do not meet performance targets,
but does not require it.
65
Some states’ legislation allows them to close the school or restart it as a
charter; some states have even created “extraordinary authority districts,” which give states signifcant
power and capacity to take over and operate continually underperforming districts or schools.
66
While legislation in many states authorizes state takeovers, in many states the state education agency
is reluctant to use that authority. When Mass Insight interviewed SEA turnaround leads, district
turnaround leaders, and school turnaround principals in eight diferent states, many admitted that
their SEA turnaround ofces did not have the capacity to take over a school even when the data
leaves no choice, and instead will cycle in new leadership or rebuild leadership capacity. Other states
will instead turn to pulling SIG funding when a school is not exhibiting fdelity of implementation to
their approved improvement plan or is simply repeatedly failing to improve. These decisions are
often made by an SEA ofce such as federal programs, school turnaround, or school improvement.
In the end, many states are fnding it difcult to act upon school improvement implementation after
becoming an ESEA waiver state. Difculties range from lacking fnancial capacity to monitor districts
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with fdelity, to waiver statutes conficting with preexisting state law. In some cases, logistics are proving
to be major obstacles. For example, Virginia was unable to comply with the frst Turnaround Principle
(requiring an efective school leader be in place). As required by Virginia state law, an inefective
principal in a priority school must be notifed of imminent removal by June; however the schools were
not labeled priority until later in the summer. As a result, the state was forced to wait until the end of
the following school year to take action against the inefective principals. This discrepancy between
state and federal law causes state education ofcials to struggle with getting the best conditions in
place for students.
67
C. Why Early Learning Doesn’t Make Sense Under the Current Incentive Structure
While the ability of federal turnaround funds to support actions that improve student outcomes is as
of yet unproven,
68
we know that federal requirements have enormous power to drive local spending.
And in this case, the incentives are aligned to point one way: away from early learning.
In any turnaround strategy where test scores in 3rd grade and upward are the key metric of success,
early learning will be discouraged. Take the hypothetical of a turnaround school that, in year one of
its turnaround, institutes a preschool program for 4-year-olds. Those children will not take 3rd grade
accountability tests until year fve of the turnaround program—at which point their impact on the
success or failure of the turnaround efort will be minimal at best. Furthermore, because schools
will frequently have multiple cohorts of students whose test scores are being used for accountability
purposes, the impact of those preschool-educated children on a turnaround school’s performance
may be minimal.
Of course, this hypothetical assumes that a successful 4-year-old preschool program is instituted in
year one of a turnaround; research shows that high quality is needed to have long-term impacts,
69
which can be difcult to achieve in year one of a turnaround. Moreover, research also shows that the
most efective interventions for the children with the greatest needs are those that last for more than
one year.
70
As noted earlier, many children will have fallen behind long before entering a 4-year-old
preschool classroom,
71
suggesting that for many turnaround schools a 4-year-old preschool program
may help incrementally but will not necessarily deliver dramatic change in the profle of incoming
kindergartners.
These challenges are only magnifed by the leadership turnover experienced by all schools, particularly
turnaround schools, because leaders with short tenures may not be in a position to focus on long-
term strategies. Research on principal efectiveness has indicated that it takes on average fve years
to put into place a teaching staf in addition to fully implementing policies and practices that will have
a positive efect on school performance.
72
Yet, principal tenure averages only three to four years in
a standard performing school
73
and even less for low-performing schools.
74
A study of principals in
Tier III turnaround schools in Arizona showed that the majority had tenure of three years or fewer.
75
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Tenure is also low for superintendents in large urban school districts: A 2010 survey of urban district
leaders found that superintendents averaged approximately three and a half years on the job.
76
If
superintendents and principals do not reasonably expect to be on the job for fve years, they may
be unlikely to favor strategies that take at least fve years to pay of, and more likely to focus on
strategies that show more immediate impact on their key metrics.
Child mobility only makes it harder for local leaders to think of preschoolers as a worthwhile long-
term investment. Research on school change indicates that just over half of kindergarteners remain
in the same school by the end of 3rd grade, while over one-third will change schools at least once
between kindergarten and 3rd grade.
77
The mobility rate is even higher in the lowest-performing
schools,
78
where high mobility is associated with disadvantaged and low-income status.
79
In part
because of higher mobility in high-needs schools, superintendents and principals in turnaround
settings may reasonably calculate that putting turnaround resources into early learning will not
serve as an efective strategy in a plan for short-term school improvement, because a meaningful
percentage of the children served may end up moving elsewhere. Adopting new accountability in the
K–2 grades would allow turnaround schools to see at least some short-term beneft from the early
learning investment in their accountability metrics during the K–2 years. Even if leaders of turnaround
schools with high rates of mobility doubt that early learning investment may not help them achieve
their accountability metrics, the state has a signifcant interest in seeing children beneft from high-
quality early learning: many of the children that change schools may move within a district or across
districts but remain within the state.
80
This means that if anything, the state should be creating positive
incentives for early learning investment.
In sum, while the children themselves and the system as a whole may beneft from the provision
of high-quality early learning, the improved child outcome results supported by early learning do
not currently impact the metrics for which key turnaround decision-makers are held accountable.
81
Accordingly, those key decision-makers are in many instances making the rationally self-interested
choice to invest elsewhere. The only way to fundamentally change the level of early learning investment
in turnaround schools is to change the orientation of turnaround decision-makers’ rational self-
interest.
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IV. REDESIGNING THE SYSTEM
Fundamentally changing how turnaround metrics infuence implementation will require action at the
federal, state, and local level. This section proposes actions that leaders at all of those levels can take to
change the way turnarounds are implemented, with the goal of utilizing high-quality early learning as a
long-term strategy for school improvement. The recommendations are written to be at least somewhat
independent, so that stakeholders and decision-makers at any level can act independently; that said,
clearly the change will be most dramatic if all of these actions are taken together.
A. The Federal Government Can Be Tighter on Goals, Flexible on Means
1. Requiring Early Learning as Part of Goal-Setting
US Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, has often expressed a desire to be “tight on goals, loose on
means”
82
—setting clear targets but giving local actors the fexibility to determine how to meet those
targets. In school turnaround, however, federal policies have largely been just the opposite: States
(and often school districts) are allowed to set their own goals for turnaround schools but are given
prescriptive models for how to achieve those goals. While the means have been made more fexible
in recent years,
83
the federal government could do more to help ensure that states, districts, and
schools are setting the right goals.
The federal government could take an important step toward enhancing the incentives to include
early learning in school turnaround eforts by requiring states to set goals for improving early learning
and early elementary grade performance as part of any federally funded turnaround efort. The exact
goals can vary by states given diferences in overall state accountability systems and approaches. But
it would be appropriate for the federal government to require that states have those goals, which
would shape resource use and local decision-making in turnaround work. The goals would need to
be grounded in revised accountability metrics (as discussed in IV.B.3 below), with a focus on both
improved professional performance and improved child outcomes.
A major purpose of school turnaround is to create rapid improvement in school performance—
essentially, to break and reset the school’s trajectory. But changing a school’s trajectory matters at
least as much before 3rd grade as it does after. Most of the hard work of turning around a school
takes place at the state and local level, so the best role the federal government can play to shape that
work is to ensure that state and local turnaround leaders are addressing the issue of kindergarten
readiness and early elementary performance.
2. Providing Dedicated Funds for Early Learning
Another approach that the federal government has been asked to consider is to provide targeted
funding, through SIG or some other sources, to support early learning as part of turnaround
packages, or incentives to use Title I funds to support early learning (which is already permitted).
84
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While dedicated funding for efective early learning is generally a good thing, there is a risk that
separate funding streams supporting early learning in turnaround schools that are not tied to the
primary outcomes of the turnaround efort will turn early learning into a side project, rather than a
core focus of the turnaround work. The most efective early learning programs will be those that are
of high quality and well aligned to improved K–2 eforts, and while that is possible through a separate
dedicated funding stream, it is less likely if the overall metrics of success in turnaround do not track
progress before 3rd grade. Accordingly, dedicating turnaround funds for early learning is far more
likely to be efective if the goals of the turnaround include a focus on successful preparation for
kindergarten entry and achievement in the early elementary years.
It is also worth noting that dedicating federal funds to early learning represents tightness on means
rather than goals. Increasing spending on early learning in school turnaround is a strategy, not a goal,
and at the federal level, the appropriate focus is on the goal—improved child outcomes—rather than
the strategy.
85
Dedicating a set percentage of school turnaround funds for early learning would be an
improvement over the current situation, but the more impactful course of action would be to change
the incentives that afect all decisions about school turnaround funds—so that early learning would
be a logical investment for local leaders charged with allocating those funds.
3. Creating an Early Learning Turnaround Model
On September 8, 2014, the US Department of Education proposed new regulations governing the
School Improvement Grant program.
86
The proposal includes the creation of an early learning model
for school turnaround, which represents an important recognition by the Department of Education
of the role that early learning can play in improving long-term school outcomes.
87
The model requires
implementing districts to provide full-day kindergarten, high-quality preschool, and joint planning
across grades, in addition to other requirements similar or identical to the requirements of other
models.
88
The major limitation of the Department’s approach is that it creates a framework for implementing
early learning in turnaround without changing the incentives to do so. It is true that the regulations
also extend the period of turnaround from three to fve years,
89
which gives children in early learning
more time to work through the system—but still, preschoolers from year one of a turnaround will
only enter 3rd grade in the ffth year of a turnaround, meaning that the impact of preschool on
turnaround metrics is still marginal. Accordingly, creating this model without changing the metrics
by which turnarounds are judged will mean schools have no additional motivation to support early
learning, even if they now have a more explicit mechanism for doing so.
90
Amending the means
without changing the goals is unlikely to yield substantial new investment of turnaround funds in
early learning.
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B. States Can Develop and Use Better Data to Shape Local Action
While all turnaround schools have low overall performance, the nature of the problems—and most
promising solutions—may vary widely from school to school. Accordingly, one important role of the
state is to ensure that turnaround eforts are based on an accurate diagnosis of the problems, and
include strategies reasonably calculated to address those problems. There are several data-based
strategies states can support that help maximize the likelihood of success in their turnaround eforts.
1. Quantify the Kindergarten Entry Gap in Turnaround Schools
One important strategy turnaround schools can use is assessments that help them understand
the knowledge and skill base of their incoming kindergarteners. In some states, kindergarten entry
assessments are already in widespread use; in others, they are under development.
91
Even in states
without a statewide kindergarten entry assessment, states could ensure that turnaround schools are
using kindergarten entry assessments to understand children’s development, abilities, and knowledge
prior to entering kindergarten. Kindergarten entry assessments can beneft educators by ofering
a baseline snapshot of children’s readiness that can be meaningfully used to support instruction,
promote program alignment and improvement, and enhance learning environments.
92
It can also
give school personnel and families valuable information on children’s learning and development as
they move through kindergarten into successive grades and acquire new concepts and skills.
93
Leading experts have cautioned against using kindergarten entry assessment to evaluate the
efectiveness of individual early learning providers.
94
It is appropriate, however, to use kindergarten
entry assessment to inform how best to use resources in a turnaround setting. For example, if the
assessments show that children are developmentally behind at kindergarten entry, that indicates that
the school may greatly beneft from an early learning strategy to help close the early achievement
gap. On the fip side, if the kindergarten entry assessments show more promising results than 3rd
grade assessments, schools might focus resources primarily on addressing disparities in the early
elementary years. Of course, at many schools both kindergarten entry and K–2 performance will be
an issue, but kindergarten entry assessment results will help turnaround leaders understand the
scope of the problem and target resource- across the birth to 3rd grade spectrum.
2. Identify Child Early Learning Experiences
One challenge that elementary schools face is that their incoming kindergarteners have had a
wide variety of experiences during their preschool years. In some turnaround schools, many of the
children may have received state-funded preschool or Head Start—but not necessarily from the same
providers. In some schools, children may have largely been in child care settings, either center-based
or home-based.
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The challenge of turnaround schools having to serve children coming from multiple settings is not
unique to elementary schools because many turnaround high schools and middle schools have
multiple feeder schools as well. But the challenge is far greater in elementary school. The early learning
landscape is incredibly diverse, and importantly, in many communities, only a small percentage of
children are served by the programs run through a school district.
95
In addition, most early learning
programs operate without the attendance boundaries that most public schools use,
96
so the children
entering a given turnaround elementary school may have received early learning services in other
communities.
The frst step to addressing this challenge is quantifying it. Turnaround schools should identify what
early learning experiences their entering kindergarteners are coming from.
Having that information
can then shape a school’s strategy for engaging the early learning community. For example, if a
given school’s entering kindergarteners come primarily from a small number of Head Start or state
preschool providers, the school can build a strategy focused on partnership with those providers.
If the entering class comes from a broader range of settings and early learning experiences, then
diferent strategies may be needed. (Local strategies are discussed further in subsection IV.C below.)
Having this information is an essential frst step in the process, however, and turnaround schools
should be required to undertake it as part of their work plan—potentially with assistance from the
state, regional entities, or their district.
3. Create Metrics for Early Success
Whether the federal government requires states to defne metrics of school turnaround success
focused on improving early learning and early elementary performance, states can require such
metrics in local turnarounds. States have the choice of either defning the metrics themselves or
requiring each turnaround school to defne the metric itself, as described in III.B.1. Presumably states
will approach this issue in the same manner they approach the larger question of setting turnaround
metrics.
Accountability for turnaround success should focus on the same two goals that accountability
systems writ large should focus on: improving professional practice and improving child outcomes.
97
Importantly, there must be metrics that allow progress toward these goals to be measured in
kindergarten through 2nd grade, so that the impact of early learning can be felt within the frst
three years of the turnaround. In the birth through 2nd grade years, the balance between these two
categories should be weighted toward professional practice, in part because it can be measured
more consistently. This is essential for the purpose of having external validators declare that a school
has made sufcient progress to exit turnaround status.
• Measures of school-wide professional practice should broadly encompass the range of activities
that successful schools engage in. A research-based framework for doing so has been identifed
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by the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research (as noted in III.B.1), and
includes fve “essential elements”: school instructional guidance systems, professional capacity,
parent-community-school ties, the learning climate, and school leadership to drive change.
98
Using these metrics involves external reviewers evaluating schools, which is already a part of
some states’ turnaround process.
99
• Child outcome metrics for children prior to 3rd grade should be ones that are developmentally
appropriate, that measure progress along critical developmental domains, and that can be
externally validated. At this point, existing child assessments that meet these standards were
not designed for purposes of school-level accountability. For now, in the early years, measures
of professional practice should account for well more than 50% of a school’s accountability.
– One example of a metric that might be used is chronic absentee rate. Research has shown
that young children and adolescents who are chronically absent learn less and develop
fewer skills during the school year and experience lower overall academic performance.
Chronic absence in preschool and the early elementary grades is strongly linked to chronic
absenteeism in later years.
100
Chronic absentee rate is already being used as a metric by
the California CORE districts in their ESEA waiver.
101
– While there are some measures that can be used already to measure child learning and
development prior to 3rd grade, the state of the art is emerging, and more work is needed
in this area.
102
Though leading early childhood researchers have cautioned against
using child assessments as accountability measures,
103
existing tools—including
kindergarten readiness assessments, and nationally-normed tool such as the Peabody
Picture Vocabulary Test
104
(measuring receptive vocabulary) and the Woodcock-Johnson-III
105
(measuring cognitive abilities)—have increasingly been used in research and early learning
settings to examine child outcomes. Thus, while these child assessment results should not
be used to determine whether a school should remain in turnaround status, they should
be used by leaders in turnaround schools (and non-turnaround schools) as an important
gauge of child progress.
Within these categories, to the extent possible, metrics of turnaround improvement should be aligned
to the diagnosis that led to the school’s placement in turnaround status, so that the metrics measure
the school’s progress in whatever areas were identifed as needing improvement.
Using metrics for turnaround accountability focused on the birth through 2nd grade years is essential
to getting turnaround schools to focus on instructional quality and child outcomes in these years. If
these factors are weighted as heavily (or more heavily) then test scores in later years, it will create
strong incentives for turnaround schools to focus on the quality of the early learning experiences of
their future students, the quality of coordination between the school and early learning providers,
and the quality of instruction in kindergarten through 2nd grade. Improving in these areas will not
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help schools with their 3rd grade test scores within three years of launching a turnaround, but they
can help change the long-term prognosis for student success in the turnaround school.
States should also emphasize the importance of rigorously evaluating the impact and quality of early
learning interventions in the turnaround context. While efective early learning interventions can be
meaningful, part of operating in the turnaround context is making sure that all strategies (including
early learning) are also carefully evaluated. If early learning strategies are not demonstrating their
intended efect, then an alternative approach should be taken.
C. Local Schools Can Provide Services and Coordinate with Partners
Schools and school districts support early learning in multiple ways. One important method is as a direct
provider: Many schools provide Head Start or preschool (funded either by the federal government or
state or local funds), and some go beyond that to provide additional early childhood services. Another
important method is being active contributors to the local early learning community, whether or not a
school is a direct service provider. How a school approaches each of these methods should be shaped
by available resources and community need.
1. Schools Can Be Direct Service Providers
Some turnaround schools are already direct providers of preschool and infant/toddler services
(including Head Start and Early Head Start) through some combination of federal, state, and local
funds. Whether a school is currently providing early learning, part of developing its turnaround plan
should be assessing whether to increase its early learning oferings. If a school’s analysis shows that
its kindergarteners are developmentally behind, and many of its kindergarteners have not had access
to efective early learning, then the school should strongly consider expanding its early learning
services—and ensuring that any services it does provide are of sufcient quality and duration to meet
the needs of families and have an educational impact. There are multiple approaches schools can take
to expand access to quality preschool, either through adding new classrooms or improving the quality
of existing classrooms, in a manner integrated into the overall approach to school improvement:
• Use school turnaround funds. These fexible funds can be used for early learning, but generally
have not been. The reason, of course, has frequently been that those funds were spent on
strategies that had an immediate impact on turnaround metrics. If the metrics of turnaround are
changed to include early learning and early elementary performance, then these fexible funds
can be used on early learning as a strategy that can have an immediate impact on how the school
performs under those metrics.
• Aggressively seek available federal and state funding. This opportunity may not be available in
all states, but in states where state-funded preschool is expanding it may well be a viable option—
either through a state formula or a grant application process.
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• Reprioritize other fexible funds such as general state aid, local property tax funds, or
Title I dollars. This approach is difcult because turnaround schools have many needs, but if an
analysis has shown that children are entering kindergarten behind, it may be possible to make the
case for repurposing funds in this manner.
Before expanding the number of early learning classrooms a school provides directly, it should also
survey the early childhood landscape in the community. It may be that in some instances, the provider
best equipped for rapid expansion is not the school itself but a private provider or Head Start grantee.
Every community’s needs and resources will be diferent, so analysis and communication will be
critical for schools seeking to fund direct expansion. One option that many districts have used is to
use district funds to provide services through private providers, and there are numerous models that
can be efective depending on state law and local context.
106
2. Schools Can Partner with Community Providers to Improve Quality and Access
Even if a turnaround school has no new funds to dedicate to expanding access to early learning, it can
improve the efectiveness of its partnerships in the community to create a more seamless continuum
of learning. There are a number of practices schools can engage in that improve the experience for
children enrolling in kindergarten:
• Efective transition planning that focuses on children’s movement through the learning continuum,
particularly during the shift from prekindergarten to kindergarten.
107
To help sustain gains from
early learning, a smooth transition plan must ensure the readiness of children for school, readiness
of schools to serve children, and readiness of families and communities to support children.
108
This can include intentional time for transition practices, data alignment and transfers, and clear
communications about transition processes for parents.
• Aligned curriculum and assessments between and within pre-kindergarten and kindergarten,
including cross-training for teachers. These linkages have important implications for how children
experience continuity and should be aimed at what is meaningful to children’s learning and
development.
109
• Efective, aligned professional development for early learning and K–12 teachers that emphasizes
the full birth to 3rd grade continuum. Professional development should be high quality and
ongoing in its approach. For example, professional development at Educare Schools is built into
the program structure and occurs routinely. The Educare professional development model focuses
on intensive embedded staf development, an interdisciplinary approach, and refective practice
and supervision.
110
Joint opportunities for professional development including both preschool and
K–2 teachers can also help create a smoother educational continuum.
• Quality family and community engagement is an essential component to supporting and advancing
young children’s learning, as referenced in Part II.C. Schools can help to foster the notion that this
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transition is a shared responsibility among many individuals and institutions. It is also a process
that all partners experience and not only an event that occurs to a child.
111
Schools with students coming from a diverse array of early childhood experiences may face diferent
challenges to engaging in these practices compared to schools that draw a high percentage of their
students from a small number of early learning providers. Regardless of the number of partnerships
involved, however, schools must continue to work closely with communities. By developing strong
connections with local providers and the larger community, schools recognize the dynamic nature
of relationships involved in the successful transition of a child from early learning to elementary
school.
112
How schools approach their relationships with community providers may vary somewhat depending
on the district’s provision for school choice. Elementary schools in districts where attendance
boundaries largely defne enrollment may have an easier time approaching early learning providers
in their catchment area because those providers will know that their children will likely end up in that
public school. In contrast, elementary schools in districts with strong choice provisions may have
stronger incentives to form meaningful partnerships with high-quality early learning providers and
engage in instructional alignment eforts, which could lead to parents of children enrolled in those
early learning programs choosing to send their child to that elementary school.
V. CONCLUSION
Early learning is an important strategy for improving the lowest-performing schools, but the current
incentive structure in school turnaround is set up to discourage the use of this strategy. By changing how
the success of turnaround eforts are measured, turnaround leaders—at the federal, state, and district
level—can change the practices used in turnaround schools to increase the percentage of children who
enter kindergarten ready to succeed. Improving kindergarten readiness is a strategy with signifcant
potential to permanently improve long-term child outcomes in turnaround schools, so creating incentives
that support kindergarten readiness are a critical change to school turnaround eforts—one that could
substantially boost the likelihood that once schools have been turned around once, they will remain on
the right trajectory.
Importantly, the problem of accountability structures setting the wrong incentives for early learning is
not one limited to turnaround schools. While non-turnaround schools may not face quite the same level
of pressure to improve dramatically in three to fve years, they too are accountable primarily for their
test scores in 3rd grade and up. What makes the turnaround context special is the required timeline for
improvement, and the additional resources provided to make that rapid improvement. But there is no
question that lessons to be learned from changing the accountability metrics for turnaround schools are
ones that could potentially be meaningful throughout the public education system.
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ENDNOTES
1 The authors are grateful to their many colleagues at the Ounce of Prevention Fund and Mass Insight Education
who reviewed and commented on drafts of this paper. The authors are also thankful for input from their external
reviewers: Madeleine Bayard, Laura Bornfreund, Lori Connors-Tadros, Daria Hall, Nancy Shier, Conor Williams,
Brandon Wright, and Margie Yeager. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not
necessarily represent those of the reviewers.
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(2009). “Family Engagement, Diverse Families, and Early Childhood Education Programs: An Integrated Overview
of the Literature.” National Association for the Education of Young Children.http://www.naeyc.org/fles/naeyc/fle/
ecprofessional/EDF_Literature%20Review.pdf.
24 US Department of Education. (2012). “SIG Cohort 1 National Summary, 2010-2011.” Ofce of School Turnarounds,
School Improvement Grants.http://www2.ed.gov/programs/sif/sig_national_data_summary_sy10-11.pdf.
25 Lee, V.E., Smith, J.B., Perry, T.E., and Smiley, M.A. (1999). “Social Support, Academic Press and Student
Achievement: A View From the Middle Grades in Chicago.” Chicago Annenberg Research Center.http://ccsr.
uchicago.edu/publications/social-support-academic-press-and-student-achievement-view-middle-grades-chicago.
26 Dearing, E., Krieder, H., Simpkins, S., and Weiss, H. “Family Involvement in School and Low-Income Children’s
Literacy Performance”; Henderson, A.T. and Mapp, K.L. (2002). “A New Wave of Evidence: The Impact of School,
Family, and Community Connections on Student Achievement.” National Center for Family and Community
Connections with Schools, SEDL.http://www.sedl.org/connections/resources/evidence.pdf. Hong, S.
and Longo, F. (2012). “Making Family and School Connections: A Look at Best Practices.”http://wgee.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/ParentInvolvementresearchbrief12.2012.kd_.pdf.
27 Mass Insight Education. (2011). “When Bold Steps are Needed: What Does it Really Take to Turn Around Schools?”http://www.massinsight.org/publications/turnaround/53/fle/1/pubs/2010/0.
28 Coalition for Community Schools. (n.d.) “What is a Community School?”http://www.communityschools.org/
aboutschools/what_is_a_community_school.aspx; The Children’s Aid Society. (n.d.). “School-Based Health Centers.”http://www.childrensaidsociety.org/health-counseling/school-based-health-centers.
29 Harris, E. and Wilkes, S. “Partnerships for Learning: Community Support for School Success.” (2013). Harvard Family
Research Project.http://www.hfrp.org/publications-resources/browse-our-publications/partnerships-for-learning-
community-support-for-youth-success?utm_source=Evaluators%2BSite%2BDirectors&utm_medium=Email&utm_
campaign=PartnershipsForLearning; Blank, M.J., Melaville, A., and Shah, B.P. (2003).“Making the Diference:
Research and Practice in Community Schools.” Coalition for Community Schools.http://www.communityschools.
org/assets/1/page/ccsfullreport.pdf; Positive Behavioral Intervention and Supports. (2014). “Wraparound Services
and Positive Behavior Supports.”http://www.pbis.org/school/tertiary_level/wraparound.aspx; Brown, J. (April
12, 2014). “CPS Success May Become a National Model.” Cincinnati Enquirer.http://www.cincinnati.com/story/
news/education/2014/04/11/us-experts-see-cps-success/7627417/?from=global&sessionKey=&autologin=&utm_
content=bufer6685c&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=bufer.
30 Reform Support Network. (2014). “Strategies for Community Engagement in School Turnaround.”http://www2.
ed.gov/about/inits/ed/implementation-support-unit/tech-assist/strategies-for-community-engagement-in-school-
turnaround.pdf.
31 Mediratta, K., Shah, S., and McAlister, S. (2008). “Organized Communities, Stronger Schools: A Preview of Research
Findings.” American Educational Research Association.http://annenberginstitute.org/cip/mott/presentations/
organized-communities-stronger-schools.pdf.
32 Mediratta, K. et al. (2007). “The Impacts of Community Organizing on School and District Capacity.” Society for
Community Research and Action.http://annenberginstitute.org/cip/mott/presentations/impacts-of-community-
organizing.pdf.
33 McAlister, S. (2013). “Why Community Engagement Matters in School Turnaround.” Voices in Urban Education:
Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University.http://vue.annenberginstitute.org/issues/36/why-
community-engagement.
CHANGING THE METRICS OF TURNAROUND TO ENCOURAGE EARLY LEARNING STRATEGIES 28
POLICY CONVERSATIONS
Conversation No. 4 Version 1.0 September 22, 2014
34 Savitz-Romer, M., Jager-Hyman, J., and Coles, A. (2009). “Removing Roadblocks to Rigor. Pathways to College
Network at Institute for Higher Education Policy.”http://www.ihep.org/assets/fles/programs/pcn/Roadblocks.pdf.
35 National Center on Parent, Family, and Community Engagement. (n.d.) “Parent, Family, and Community
Practices and Outcomes: Executive Summary.”http://www.hfrp.org/var/hfrp/storage/fckeditor/File/fle/Early
Childhood%20Education/pfcp-outcomes-executive-summary-081111.pdf.
36 Schumacher, R. (2013). “Family Engagement and CCR&R.” Presentation for Child Care Aware of America National
Symposium.http://www.naccrra.org/sites/default/fles/default_site_pages/2013/naccrra_family_engagement_
support.pdf.
37 Kennel, P. (2013). “Family Engagement at Educare.”http://www.earlysuccess.org/sites/default/fles/website_fles/
fles/Family%20Engagement%20at%20Educare.pdf; Educare Learning Network. (n.d.). “Program Core Features.”http://www.educareschools.org/about/pdfs/EducareCoreFeatures-Jan2012.pdf; Educare Learning Network. (April
2014). “Educare Learning Network Research Agenda”; Center for High Impact Philanthropy. (n.d.). “Educare.” http://
www.impact.upenn.edu/images/uploads/140227_Educare2.pdf.
38 Smythe-Leistico, K. (2012). “A New Approach to Transitions: Welcoming Families and Their Ideas into Kindergarten
Classrooms.” The Family Involvement Network of Educators, Vol. 4, Issue 1.http://www.hfrp.org/family-
involvement/publications-resources/a-new-approach-to-transitions-welcoming-families-and-their-ideas-into-
kindergarten-classrooms. Patton, C. and Wang, J. (September 20, 2012). “Ready for Success: Creating Collaborative
and Thoughtful Transitions into Kindergarten.” The Family Involvement Network of Educators, Vol. 4, Issue 3.http://www.hfrp.org/early-childhood...ces/ready-for-success-creating-collaborative-
and-thoughtful-transitions-into-kindergarten.
39 Mass Insight Education. “When Bold Steps are Needed: What Does it Really Take to Turn Around Schools?”;
Austin, M.J. et al. (2004). “Serving Low-Income Families in Poverty Neighborhoods Using Promising Programs and
Practices.” Center for Social Services Research at University of California at Berkeley.http://cssr.berkeley.edu/pdfs/
lowIncomeFam.pdf.
40 Bireda, S. and Moses, J. (2010). “Reducing Student Poverty in the Classroom.” Center for American Progress. http://
cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/issues/2010/09/pdf/reducing_student_poverty.pdf; WestEd and
Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies. (2009). “The Critical Connection Between Student Health and
Academic Achievement: How Schools and Policymakers Can Achieve a Positive Impact.” California Education
Supports Project.http://www.calendow.org/uploadedFiles/Publications/By_Topic/Access/General/Critical
Connection%20between%20Student.pdf.
41 Pianta, R.C. (2002). “Questions & Answers: Robert Pianta Talks About Kindergarten Transition.” Family Involvement
Network of Educators, Harvard Family Research Project, Issue 4.http://www.hfrp.org/publications-resources/
browse-our-publications/questions-answers-robert-pianta-talks-about-kindergarten-transition.
42 Kreider, H. (April 2002). “Getting Parents “Ready” for Kindergarten: The Role of Early Childhood Education.” Family
Involvement Network of Educators, Harvard Family Research Project.http://www.hfrp.org/publications-resources/
browse-our-publications/getting-parents-ready-for-kindergarten-the-role-of-early-childhood-education; Kraft-
Sayre, M.E. and Pianta, R.C. (2000). “Enhancing the Transition to Kindergarten: Linking Children, Families, and
Schools. National Center for Early Development and Learning, University of Virginia.https://www.pakeys.org/
uploadedcontent/docs/Transition%20into%20Formal%20Schooling/Enhancing%20the%20Transition%20to%20
Kindergarten%20rev.PDF.
43 Applied Survey Research. (December 2010). “School Readiness and Student Achievement. A Longitudinal
Analysis of Santa Clara and San Mateo County Students.”http://www.siliconvalleycf.org/sites/default/fles/
Longitudinal%202010%20FINAL%2012.09.10%20(PCF).pdf; ReadyNation. (2013). “The Vital Link: Early Childhood
Investment is the First Step to High School Graduation.”http://www.readynation.org/uploads/20130919_
ReadyNationVitalLinksLowResEndnotes.pdf; Annie E. Casey Foundation. “Early Warning! Why Reading by the End
of Third Grade Matters”; Hernandez, D.J. “Double Jeopardy: How Third Grade Reading Skills and Poverty Infuence
High School Graduation.”
CHANGING THE METRICS OF TURNAROUND TO ENCOURAGE EARLY LEARNING STRATEGIES 29
POLICY CONVERSATIONS
Conversation No. 4 Version 1.0 September 22, 2014
44 Kreider, H. “Getting Parents “Ready” for Kindergarten: The Role of Early Childhood Education.”
45 Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP). “Title I Early Education: Models for Using ARRA Funds.” (n.d.)http://www.clasp.org/documents/Title-I-Models-for-ARRA.pdf.
46 US Department of Education. “School Improvement Grants – Eligibility.” (November 28, 2011).http://www2.ed.gov/programs/sif/eligibility.html.
47 US Department of Education. “School Improvement Grants–American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009;
Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965.” Federal Register, Vol. 74, No. 164, 43101.http://www2.ed.gov/legislation/FedRegister/other/2009-3/082609d.html; Center on Innovation & Improvement.
“School Improvement Grants Online Tool.” (2011).http://www.centerii.org/sig/docs/publications/sig_online_tool_
fnal_complete.pdf.
48 US Department of Education. (September 8, 2014). “Proposed Requirements–School Improvement Grants–Title I of
the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965.” Federal Register, Vol. 79, No. 173, 53254.http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2014-09-08/pdf/2014-21185.pdf.
49 US Department of Education. (November 1, 2010). “Guidance on Fiscal Year 2010 School Improvement Grants.
Under 1003(g) of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.” Ofce of Elementary and Secondary Education.http://ed.gov/programs/sif/sigguidance11012010.pdf; US Department of Education. (March 2010). “What’s Possible:
Turnaround Around America’s Lowest-Achieving Schools.” Homeroom blog.http://www.ed.gov/blog/2010/03/
whats-possible-turning-around-americas-lowest-achieving-schools/.
50 O’Brien, E.M. and Dervarics, C.J. (2013). “Which Way Up: What Research Says About School Turnaround Strategies.”
Center for Public Education.http://www.centerforpubliceducation.org/Main-Menu/Policies/Which-Way-Up-At-a-
glance/Which-Way-Up-Full-Report.pdf.
51 US Department of Education. (November 21, 2013). “School Improvement Grant (SIG) Assessment Results: Cohorts
1 and 2.”http://www.edweek.org/media/sigassessmentresults-blog.pdf.
52 113th Congress, 1st session. (January 17, 2014). “Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2014.” Public Law No: 113-76.http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-113hr3547enr/pdf/BILLS-113hr3547enr.pdf; Klein, A. (January 28, 2014). “SIG
Program Gets Makeover in Newly Passed Budget.” Education Week, Vol. 33, Issue 19.http://www.edweek.org/ew/
articles/2014/01/29/19budget-sig.h33.html?tkn=RNNFnF05hWdc4BSp8qDhTuv4WyG8aiQY7T4h&cmp=ENL-EU-
NEWS2.
53 The White House Ofce of the Press Secretary. (September 23, 2011). “Remarks by the President on No Child
Left Behind Flexibility.”http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-ofce/2011/09/23/remarks-president-no-child-left-
behind-fexibility; US Department of Education, “ESEA Flexibility.” (June 7, 2012).http://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/
guid/esea-fexibility/index.html; US Department of Education. Letter from Education Secretary to Chief State School
Ofcers. (September 23, 2011).http://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/secletter/110923.html.
54 McNeil, M. (April 10, 2014). “Many States Left Key NCLB Flexibility on the Table.” Education Week.http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/04/10/28multiple.h33.html?cmp=ENL-EU-NEWS1; Polikof, M.,
McEachin, A., Wrabel, S., and Duque, M. (2014). “The Waive of the Future? School Accountability in the Waiver Era.”
Educational Researcher, Vol. 14, No. 1, 45-54.http://edr.sagepub.com/content/43/1/45.full.
55 US Department of Education, “ESEA Flexibility.”
56 US Department of Education, “ESEA Flexibility.”
57 US Department of Education, “Turnaround Principles.”
CHANGING THE METRICS OF TURNAROUND TO ENCOURAGE EARLY LEARNING STRATEGIES 30
POLICY CONVERSATIONS
Conversation No. 4 Version 1.0 September 22, 2014
58 US Department of Education. “Guidance on Fiscal Year 2010 School Improvement Grants. Under 1003(g) of the
Elementary and Secondary Education Act”; School Improvement Grants applications can be found from the
Connecticut State Department of Education athttps://www2.ed.gov/programs/sif/summary/ctapp.pdf; New Jersey
Department of Education athttps://www2.ed.gov/programs/sif/summary/njapp.pdf; and Virginia Department of
Education athttps://www2.ed.gov/programs/sif/summary/vaapp.pdf.
59 US Department of Education. “Guidance on Fiscal Year 2010 School Improvement Grants. Under 1003(g) of the
Elementary and Secondary Education Act.”; School Improvement Grants applications can be found from the
Pennsylvania Department of Education athttps://www2.ed.gov/programs/sif/summary/paapp.pdf; and Wyoming
Department of Education athttps://www2.ed.gov/programs/sif/summary/wyapp.pdf.
60 Mass Insight Education. (2010). “Metrics for School Turnaround: A Comprehensive Set of Metrics to Measure
School Turnaround Eforts.http://www.massinsight.org/publications/stg-resources/118/fle/1/pubs; Hansen, M.
(2012). “Key Issues in Empirically Identifying Chronically Low-Performing and Turnaround Schools.” Journal of
Education for Students Placed at Risk (JESPAR), Vol. 17, No. 1-2, 55-69.http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ965549.
61 Regenstein, E. and Romero-Jurado, R. “A Framework for Rethinking State Education Accountability and Support
from Birth through High School.”
62 US Department of Education, “ESEA Flexibility.”
63 University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research. (2013). “Illinois 5Essentials Survey. Organizing
Schools for Improvement.”https://illinois.5-essentials.org/2014/.
64 US Department of Education. (2013). “EdFacts Overview.” (2013).http://www2.ed.gov/about/inits/ed/edfacts/
edfacts-overview.pdf on December 4, 2013.
65 107th Congress, 1st session. “No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.” Public Law No. 107-110.http://www2.ed.gov/
policy/elsec/leg/esea02/107-110.pdf.
66 A report by Public Impact focusing on these state-run districts draws lessons learned with regard to takeover
authority and political context, strategy to school operation, central ofce structure, and capacity to carry out
the change efort. See Public Impact. “Extraordinary Authority Districts: Design Considerations – Framework and
Takeaways.” (2014).http://publicimpact.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Extraordinary_Authority_Districts-
Public_Impact.pdf.
67 Klein, A. (July 8, 2014). “School Turnarounds Proving Heavy Lift for Waiver States. Many Still Struggling Despite
NCLB Leeway.” Education Week, Vol. 33, Issue 36.http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/07/09/36waivers.h33.
html.
68 Klein, A. (November 21, 2013). “School Improvement Grant Program Gets Mixed Grades in Ed. Dept. Analysis.”
Education Week, Politics K-12 blog,http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2013/11/us_department_of_
education_ana.html; Smarick, A. (November 19, 2012). “The Disappointing But Completely Predictable Results from
SIG.” Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Flypaper blog,http://www.edexcellence.net/commentary/education-gadfy-
daily/fypaper/2012/the-disappointing-but-completely-predictable-results-from-SIG.html.
69 Yoshikawa, H. et al. “Investing in Our Future: The Evidence Base on Preschool Education.”
70 Karoly, L.A., Kilburn, M.R., and Cannon, J.S. (2005). “Early Childhood Interventions: Proven Results, Future Promise.”
RAND Corporation.http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2005/RAND_MG341.pdf.
71 Hart, B. and Risley, T.R. “Meaningful Diferences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children.”
72 Center for Public Education. (2012). “The Principal’s Perspective: Full Report.”http://www.centerforpubliceducation.
org/principal-perspective; Seashore-Louis, K., et al. (2010). “Learning from Leadership: Investigating the Links
from Improved Student Learning.” Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement.http://www.
wallacefoundation.org/knowledge-center/school-leadership/key-research/Documents/Investigating-the-Links-to-
Improved-Student-Learning.pdf.
CHANGING THE METRICS OF TURNAROUND TO ENCOURAGE EARLY LEARNING STRATEGIES 31
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73 Seashore-Louis, K. et al. “Learning from Leadership: Investigating the Links from Improved Student Learning.”
74 Loeb, S., Kalogrides, D., and Horng, E. (2010). “Principal Preferences and Uneven Distribution of Principals Across
Schools.” Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Vol. 32, No. 2, 205-229.http://cepa.stanford.edu/sites/default/
fles/Principal_Preferences_EEPA.pdf.
75 Ylimaki, R.M. and Brundermann, L. “Turnaround Leadership Development Project: Preliminary Findings from a
Statewide Project.” University of Arizona, 2012.http://www.coe.arizona.edu/sites/default/fles/Report -
Turnaround%20Leadership%20Project%20%281%29.pdf.
76 Council of the Great City Schools. (2010). “Urban School Superintendents: Characteristics, Tenure, and Salary.”http://www.cgcs.org/cms/lib/DC00001581/Centricity/Domain/4/Supt_Survey2010.pdf.
77 Burkham, D.T., Lee, V.E., and Dwyer, J. (2009). “School Mobility in the Early Elementary Grades.”http://fcd-us.org/
sites/default/fles/BurkamSchoolMobilityInThe%20EarlyElementaryGrades.pdf.
78 O’Donnell, R. and Gazos, A. (2010). “Student Mobility in Massachusetts.” Massachusetts Department of Elementary
& Secondary Education.http://www.doe.mass.edu/infoservices/reports/mobility/0710.doc; Thomas B. Fordham
Institute and Community Research Partners. (November 2012). “Student Nomads: Mobility in Ohio’s Schools.” (http://www.edexcellence.net/sites/default/fles/publication/pdfs/OSMS Full Report 11-8-12_7_0.pdf; US
Government Accountability Ofce (GAO). (November 2010). “Many Challenges Arise in Educating Students Who
Change Schools Frequently.”http://www.gao.gov/assets/320/312480.pdf.
79 Burkham, David T., Lee, Valerie E., & Dwyer, Julie. “School Mobility in the Early Elementary Grades”; US GAO.
“Many Challenges Arise in Educating Students Who Change Schools Frequently”; National Research Council and
Institute of Medicine. (2010). “Student Mobility: Exploring the Impact of Frequent Moves on Achievement: Summary
of a Workshop.” A. Beatty, Rapporteur. Committee on the Impact of Mobility and Change on the Lives of Young
Children, Schools, and Neighborhoods. Board on Children, Youth, and Families, Division of Behavioral and Social
Sciences and Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.http://fcd-us.org/sites/default/fles/
Student%20Mobility%20Workshop.pdf.
80 According to the American Community Survey, in each of the years from 2010 to 2012 more than 75% of people
listing a new residence listed a new residence within the same state. US Census (n.d.). “Geographical Mobility/
Migration. State-to-State Migration Flows.”http://www.census.gov/hhes/migration/data/acs/state-to-state.html.
Student mobility, meanwhile, is defned and tracked diferently across states. For example, in Ohio, the Ohio
Student Mobility Research report analyzed most frequent district to district mobility patterns in the state and also
most common district to charter school mobility. During 2009-2011, 50 districts in the Cincinnati area exchanged
approximately 19,000 students; Cincinnati Public Schools also exchanged students with other major districts in the
state. See Thomas B. Fordham Institute and Community Research Partners. (November 2012). “Student Nomads:
Mobility in Ohio’s Schools”; Thomas B. Fordham Institute and Community Research Partners. (November 2012).
“Ohio Student Mobility Research Project: Cincinnati Area Profle.”http://www.communityresearchpartners.org/wp-
content/uploads/Reports/Mobility-Research/OSMS_CincinnatiAreaProfle.pdf.
81 Studies suggest student mobility has negative impact on a child’s academic achievement and in addition, creates
disruption for teaching and learning in the classroom as a whole. Teachers reported needing to alter their instruction
to support and accommodate the needs of mobile students. See Burkham, D.T., Lee, V.E., and Dwyer, J. “School
Mobility in the Early Elementary Grades”; US GAO. “Many Challenges Arise in Educating Students Who Change
Schools Frequently”; Reynolds, A.J., Chen, C.C. and Herbers, J.E. (2009). “School Mobility and Educational Success:
A Research Synthesis and Evidence on Prevention.” University of Minnesota.http://www.iom.edu/~/media/Files/
Activity%20Files/Children/ChildMobility/Reynolds%20Chen%20and%20Herbers.pdf.
82 Simon, S. (November 27, 2013). “Arne Duncan Schooled in Limits of Power.” Politico.http://www.politico.com/
story/2013/11/arne-duncan-education-secretary-100372.html.
83 III.A above.
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84 For example, the New America Foundation held a panel discussion on these topics January 14, 2013. See videohttp://newamerica.net/events/2013/turnaround_20.
85 The New America panel also recommended incentives for schools to include early learning as a priority, and
incentives for schools to partner with early learning providers in their community. A requirement to set specifc
goals for improving early learning and the early elementary grades would create such an incentive.
86 US Department of Education. “Proposed Requirements–School Improvement Grants–Title I of the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act of 1965.”
87 US Department of Education. “Proposed Requirements–School Improvement Grants–Title I of the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act of 1965.” 53258, 53267.
88 US Department of Education. “Proposed Requirements–School Improvement Grants–Title I of the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act of 1965.” 53267.
89 US Department of Education. “Proposed Requirements–School Improvement Grants–Title I of the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act of 1965.” 53255-53256.
90 It is also the case that the model itself focuses exclusively on schools as deliverers of early learning services, and
not as part of a broader system of early learning providers. In many communities schools themselves are not the
primary providers of early learning services, as discussed in IV.B.2 and IV.C.2. The Department’s proposed model
does not encourage districts and schools to defne kindergarten readiness, identify the sources of their incoming
kindergarteners, or partner with early learning providers to develop a true educational continuum.
91 In 2012, 25 states required assessments during the kindergarten year and of these states, 12 reported collecting
assessments at kindergarten entry, 10 during the school year, and 3 at both entry and during the year. Further,
in 2013, 34 states described plans for a kindergarten entry assessment. Currently, many states are in diferent
stages of implementing kindergarten entry assessment policies. For instance, as of January 2014, some states
are in the exploration stage (ex. AZ, AR, and NY), installation stage of conducting pilot assessments (ex. DC, DE,
NJ), or the initial or full implementation stage (ex. CO, CA, MD, VT, WV). See Center on Enhancing Early Learning
Outcomes. (February 2014). “Fast Fact: Information and Resources on Developing State Policy on Kindergarten
Entry Assessment.”http://ceelo.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/KEA_Fast_Fact_Feb_11_2014_2.pdf; Schilder, D.
and Carolan, M. (March 2014). “State of the State Policy Snapshot: State Early Childhood Assessment Outcomes.”
Center on Enhancing Early Learning Outcomes.http://ceelo.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/CEELO_policy_
snapshot_child_assessment_march_2014.pdf.
92 Snow, K. (2011). “Developing Kindergarten Readiness and Other Large-Scale Assessment Systems: Necessary
Considerations in the Assessment of Young Children.” Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of
Young Children.http://www.naeyc.org/fles/naeyc/fle/research/Assessment_Systems.pdf; Center on Enhancing
Early Learning Outcomes. “Fast Fact: Information and Resources on Developing State Policy on Kindergarten Entry
Assessment.”
93 Center on Enhancing Early Learning Outcomes. “Fast Fact: Information and Resources on Developing State Policy
on Kindergarten Entry Assessment.”
94 Shepard, L., Kagan, S.L., Wertz, E. (Eds.). (1998). “Principles and Recommendations for Early Childhood
Assessments.” The National Education Goals Panel.http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/negp/reports/prinrec.pdf;
National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) and National Association of Early Childhood
Specialists in State Departments of Education (NAECS/SDE). (2003). “Early Childhood Curriculum, Assessment, and
Program Evaluation. Building an Efective, Accountable System in Programs for Children Birth through Age 8.” A
Joint Position Statement of NAEYC and NAECS/SDE.https://www.naeyc.org/fles/naeyc/fle/positions/pscape.pdf;
National Early Childhood Accountability Task Force. (2007). “Taking Stock: Assessing and Improving Early Childhood
Learning and Program Quality.”http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2007/10/31/taking-
stock-assessing-and-improving-early-childhood-learning-and-program-quality; Snow, Kyle. (2011). “Developing
Kindergarten Readiness and Other Large-Scale Assessment Systems: Necessary Considerations in the Assessment
of Young Children.”
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95 Barnett, W.S., Carolan, M., Squires, J.H., and Browne, K.C. (2013). “The State of Preschool 2013: State Preschool
Yearbook. National Institute for Early Education Research.http://nieer.org/publications/state-preschool-2013.
In addition to signifcant diferences across states in overall program funding levels, there are two other major
factors that contribute to the variation in the percentage of children served by school districts: (1) the fact that in
many states a meaningful percentage of preschool service is provided through community providers, and (2) the
variation in service levels for diferent communities within each state.
96 Council of Chief State School Ofcers. (2013). “School Choice in the States: A Policy Landscape.”http://www.
ccsso.org/Resources/Publications/School_Choice_in_the_States_A_Policy_Landscape.html; Education Commission
of the States (ECS). (2013). “ECS State Policy Database Choice of Schools.”http://www.ecs.org/ecs/ecscat.nsf/
WebTopicView?OpenView&count=-1&RestrictToCategory=Choice+of+Schools--Choice/Open+Enrollment.
97 Regenstein, E. and Romero-Jurado, R. “A Framework for Rethinking State Education Accountability and Support
from Birth through High School.”
98 Sebring, P., Allensworth, E., Bryk, A., Easton, J., and Luppescu, S. “The Essential Supports for School Improvement”;
Regenstein, E. and Romero-Jurado, R. “A Framework for Rethinking State Education Accountability and Support
from Birth through High School,” 5.
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CHANGING THE METRICS OF TURNAROUND TO ENCOURAGE EARLY LEARNING STRATEGIES 34
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